Dispatch from Chicago: An assault on truth
Chicagoans are seeing the Trump administration’s assault on truth and transparency unfold in real time during an increasingly aggressive deportation campaign.
Among the reasons to join one of the thousands of No Kings protests planned worldwide for Saturday is this undeniable fact: Truth is under daily assault in America, and it flows from the top of our government.
That assault on truth is a threat to democracy, and it originates from a president whose documented lies—falsehoods, fabrications, untruths, call them whatever you will—number in the tens of thousands. And that was back in 2021, when the Washington Post published a report on nearly 31,000 “false or misleading claims” President Donald Trump made in his first term in office.
It’s anyone’s guess how many falsehoods Trump has uttered, seemingly as easily as he breathes, since then. America has never had a president whose aversion to the truth is so apparent that it even inspired the essay “Why does Donald Trump tell such blatant lies?”
“Although other presidents have lied to the public, none have lied like this,” psychology professor Geoff Beattie, who teaches at Edge Hill University in England, wrote in October 2024 for The Conversation, a news outlet that publishes research-based commentary from academics.
Naturally, Trump’s attitude filters down, giving permission to his top leaders—chosen primarily for their loyalty—to avoid the truth too, whether to reinforce lies about Chicago and Portland being war-torn, to explain away video evidence of a $50,000 bribe allegedly taken by a member of his cabal, or to otherwise gaslight Americans about reality. Instead of an administration that governs from a base of facts, the leadership turns into a regime, trusted only by the staunchest loyalists.
Democracy will continue to erode unless Americans who value truth-telling fight back against normalizing lies.
“Simply unreliable”
Here in Chicago, we’ve seen the assault on truth unfold in real time since federal agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection began flooding the streets last month in an increasingly aggressive immigration enforcement campaign. Just this week, agents deployed tear gas against protesters in two normally quiet residential neighborhoods
U.S. District Judge April Perry had strong words about the Trump administration’s lack of truth-telling last week, when she granted a temporary restraining order against the plan to deploy National Guard troops in Chicago.
“I simply cannot credit [the administration’s] declarations to the extent they contradict state and local law enforcement,” Perry said, calling the Department of Homeland Security’s assessment of the situation—a city supposedly in open rebellion—“simply unreliable.”
A federal appeals court agreed, upholding Perry’s ruling that kept National Guard troops from deploying here. (The appeals court allowed Illinois National Guard troops to remain federalized by Trump.)
That’s not all. Federal agents have been caught exaggerating or mischaracterizing two shootings of civilians, one in which an immigrant was killed.
In one shooting, a Border Patrol agent shot a woman multiple times and claimed she had sideswiped a federal vehicle and was part of a convoy of cars that confronted Border Patrol agents, according to news reports, One report said the Department of Homeland Security claimed the woman had a gun and drove herself to the hospital.
Yet, according to her lawyer, body camera video contradicts that account, showing an officer turning his vehicle into the woman’s car, then saying, “Do something bitch” before shooting her, as her lawyer said during the woman’s court hearing (federal authorities charged her with felony assault). The gun she supposedly displayed was on the passenger side of her car; she has a valid firearm and concealed-carry license. The woman, shot multiple times and bleeding profusely, had driven to a nearby auto shop, where workers called an ambulance for her.
In another shooting earlier in September, ICE agents shot and killed a Mexican immigrant who they said had tried to run them over. The Department of Homeland Security initially claimed the agent was “seriously injured” and feared for his life when he fired at the man.
The injured agent initially said his injuries were “nothing major,” as body camera video from the suburban police department showed. A witness told reporters that he never saw an agent being dragged behind the victim’s car, as DHS claimed.
A group of Illinois members of Congress want an investigation into the two shootings and the military-style, middle-of-the-night raid of a Chicago apartment building.
Pope Leo XIV, who grew up in the Chicago area, spoke recently about the media having a special responsibility to “act as a barrier against those who, through the ancient art of lying, seek to create divisions in order to rule by dividing.”
The pope is right. But it’s on all of us to protect democracy. We must choose facts over lies and fear.
Lorraine Forte is a Chicago journalist and former editorial page editor of the Chicago Sun-Times.
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With the full support of the six Christian Nationalists on the Supreme Court and GOP Congressional members the Felon is making the United States an authoritarian theocracy, with the Felon as leader and the American oligarchs running the Country (Putin's Russia).
The DA of Chicago should be investigating the shooting of the woman and the shooting of the pepper ball at the priest. They should be going to a Grand Jury, filing charges and arresting those who committed these felonies. The Felon cannot pardon the violations of State and local laws.
Trump is a sociopath. Sociopaths lie to give them an advantage. That is all.