In July 2018, at the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention in Kansas City, President Donald Trump told a room full of veterans to stop believing their own eyes. “Just remember, what you're seeing and what you're reading is not what's happening,” he said.
That’s not spin. Spin is changing the perception of a fact. That’s something else. That’s an instruction to distrust your eyes, your ears, and your ability to think.
It has a name, and it's the subject of this explainer, as part of our Psychology of Trumpism hub: political gaslighting or gaslighting in politics. If you search for “gaslighting,” the majority of information you’ll find is about relationships, where gaslighting is commonly used by an abusive partner. This explainer focuses on its use by the government or people in power.
Once you understand more about political gaslighting, the relationship between Donald Trump and his supporters will make more sense.
When first entering politics in 2015, Donald Trump immediately started doing it.
Calling cable news outlets and newspapers “Fake News” was just the beginning of his quest to become the “sole arbiter of truth.”
Luckily, Trump’s attempt to gaslight the entire country only worked on a small number of Americans—MAGA.
He successfully manipulated MAGA into believing that all of the news outlets, journalists, government officials, scientists, medical professionals, colleges/universities, immigrants, and (especially) Democrats, were all out to “get them” and everything they said was a lie.
The only one being honest and giving them the actual facts was…
Donald Trump. Classic gaslighting.
Where the Word Comes From
The term comes from a 1938 stage play by Patrick Hamilton and the 1944 film based on it. A husband secretly dims the gas lamps in the house, and when his wife notices the light fading, he tells her she's imagining it. He isn't trying to convince her of a lie. He wants to make her question her own mind.
Merriam-Webster named gaslighting its 2022 Word of the Year after lookups jumped 1,740 percent, defining it as “the act or practice of grossly misleading someone especially for one's own advantage.”
Lying and Gaslighting Are Not the Same
A liar wants you to believe something false. A gaslighter wants you to stop trusting in your ability to tell the difference, to trust your own judgment, memories, etc.
Misleading information, “alternative facts,” and deliberate misinformation can create a distorted sense of reality.
This phenomenon is particularly troubling in the age of social media, where false narratives can spread rapidly, leading to widespread confusion and mistrust.
The “Big Lie” about the 2020 election is an excellent example of this.
Sociologist Paige Sweet, in her 2019 paper The Sociology of Gaslighting in the American Sociological Review, argues that this only works where there's a power gap. The gaslighter has to be more believable than the person he's contradicting.
He borrows the authority of his position, and he uses stereotypes about who counts as credible — who's hysterical, who's biased, who's making it up.
A president has more of that borrowed authority than anyone alive.
Authoritarian leaders often manipulate public perception to maintain power, employing strategies that distort facts and create confusion
They may deny facts (”Russia, Russia, Russia hoax!”), promote conspiracy theories, or present alternative narratives to undermine trust in established institutions like the CDC.
They want to create a culture of fear where dissent is not tolerated. People are less likely to challenge their authority or question their actions.
The Playbook, in Four Moves
Deny the observable. On day three of the first Trump administration, Press Secretary Sean Spicer claimed the inauguration crowd was “the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration” — while side-by-side photographs and transit data said otherwise.
Pressed on why the White House sent him out to say something provably untrue, counselor Kellyanne Conway said he had offered “alternative facts.”
Alter the record. In September 2019, Trump wrongly said Hurricane Dorian was headed for Alabama. The National Weather Service in Birmingham corrected him to keep residents from panicking.
Instead of accepting the correction, Trump displayed a forecast map extended into Alabama with a black Sharpie, and NOAA was pushed into an unsigned statement undercutting its own meteorologists.
A Commerce Department inspector general report later found the White House chief of staff had ordered the public record changed to match the president.
The reality didn't bend to his will, so the paperwork did.
Rewrite what already happened. On January 7, 2021, Trump called the assault on the Capitol a heinous attack and said those responsible would pay. Years later, he was calling it a “day of love.” Roughly 140 officers were assaulted that day.
Former Capitol Police Sergeant Aquilino Gonell, who was beaten by the crowd and lost his career to his injuries, has spent years listening to a man describe his worst day as a day of “love” and “joy”.
Attack the witness. Every one of these moves needs the same backstop: discredit anyone who kept notes. Reporters, meteorologists, career civil servants, poll workers, judges. If the record-keepers are corrupt, the record can’t be used to convict you.
Why Political Gaslighting Works on an Entire Country
You can’t gaslight 300 million people the way you gaslight a spouse. You do it with volume.
RAND researchers Christopher Paul and Miriam Matthews named the pattern the “firehose of falsehood” — messaging that's high-volume, multichannel, relentless, and unbothered by either truth or self-consistency.
It sounds like it should fail. It doesn’t, because human memory rewards repetition and can't keep up with contradiction. Hearing something five times from five directions makes it feel familiar, and familiar feels true.
The goal isn’t to make you believe any particular claim. It’s to wear you down until picking out the truth from a pile of garbage feels like more work than it’s worth.
A worn-out public stops checking, stops arguing, and stops voting.
What It Costs the People on the Receiving End
Gaslighting in politics hits people who are already the least likely to be believed the hardest.
Ask a family whose relative was picked up in an ICE raid, then told by officials that what they witnessed at their own front door didn't happen that way.
Ask someone describing conditions inside a detention facility to a public that’s been primed to view them as a liar.
The damage isn’t abstract. It’s a person doubting their own account of the worst day of their life because the people with microphones tell the story differently.
That's the real harm behind the political theater, and it’s why learning about the tactic matters.
How to Maintain Your Sanity
- Write things down as they happen. Contemporaneous notes beat anyone’s retelling.
- Save the primary source. The video, the transcript, the original map, the original filing.
- Don’t relitigate reality. Once someone denies a documented event, you’re no longer having a factual argument. Skip to the useful question: why do they need people to forget this?
- Compare notes with other people. Isolation is the name of the game. Corroboration shuts it off.
- Name the move out loud. People who can recognize a manipulation technique are much harder to run it on.
You’re not confused. You’re not remembering it wrong. Someone is trying to make you think you are.
Check out our satirical version of the U.S. government gaslighting the country.
More from this hub: projection, malignant narcissism, and cognitive dissonance.
