“Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?” With those words in 1954, Army lawyer Joseph Welch took Senator Joe McCarthy to task and helped end McCarthy’s destructive un-American witch hunt. The time has come to say the same to Donald Trump and his MAGA allies and stop their vile perversion of our right to free speech.
American politics has always been rife with misleading statements and, at times, outright falsehoods. Mendacity just seems to be an ever-present aspect of politics. But with the ascendency of Trump, and especially this past year, things have taken an especially nasty turn, becoming so aggressive and incendiary as to pose a real threat to the health and well-being of our nation’s democracy.
The slide into a more aggressive misinformation campaign began during Obama's presidency. Republicans such as Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, and yes, Donald Trump, promoted outrageous claims against Obama—and many Republicans believed them. A CBS/New York Times poll in 2011 found that 25% of all Americans and 45% of Republicans thought that Barack Obama was not a U.S. citizen. The health care reform debate was hijacked by fears that the law would create “death panels” and that it contained “Hitler-like” policies. The silly fear that the reform legislation posed the threat of creeping socialism was, by comparison, quaint.
During Trump's campaigns and his time in office, the misinformation became bigger, more all-encompassing. He could be seen as following Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels' theory of the "big lie": tell a lie big enough, often enough, and people will come to believe it as truth. Hence, we have Trump calling all truthful, legitimate news "fake" news, compared to his own false statements, which he presents as the truth. It started during the first campaign with his outrageous claims about the criminality of undocumented immigrants and has been an aspect of just about every topic he's addressed.
These claims are all incredulous positions that fly in the face of the facts. Why then do so many Americans, not just a small radical fringe, hold these beliefs so adamantly?
The answer is clear … they respect Trump or people such as Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin, and so they have been fodder for the extreme demagoguery that Trump and others have used to create a rabid, angry, believing voter block. As for the Republican members of Congress, who have either repeated these charges or remained quiet, there's no way of knowing how much of their complicity is a product of their fear of Trump and how much is having come to believe his lies.
If actors on the political scene are so ready to pervert the truth, if they feel no ethical constraints, if they have no shame, we have reached a point where the American people need a Truth in Politics law to protect them.
To this suggestion, both liberals and conservatives will no doubt react with indignation and raise the flag of the Constitution’s 1st Amendment right of free speech. But the right of free speech is not absolute.
The Supreme Court has long recognized that there are limits to free speech. Perhaps the most relevant is the Truth in Advertising law that protects consumers from deceptive advertising. Specifically, under federal law, advertising must be truthful and non-deceptive; there must be evidence to back up any claims made; and it cannot be unfair. The law is enforced by the Federal Trade Commission.
Why is this exception made to the Constitution’s right of free speech? The reasoning behind this, and other consumer protection laws, is that the consumer is at a disadvantage vis a vis the businesses that cater to them … in this instance, because they don’t have the ability to reasonably determine for themselves the truthfulness of advertising claims and they therefore might make purchase decisions that either actually cause harm or are not in their best interest.
If consumers can be protected from false and deceptive advertising, surely the general public should be protected from false and deceptive claims in political statements and advertising that are likely to mislead and distort the voting process. Free speech advocates will say that citizens have the opportunity to learn the truth; that public debate exposes all falsehoods. That is the myth.
That was, at one time, true. But because of the advent of cable channels that cater to misinformation, the polarized nature of the populace, and the power of social media, not only do incendiary charges go viral within minutes, but people don't have the disposition to question what people they believe in say. Charges can be publicly refuted, but that has no impact.
The danger here is twofold: first, citizens will cast their vote or take other action in ways they wouldn’t if they knew the truth, acting contrary to their interests – such misinformation is thus another type of fraud used to alter election outcomes and policy decisions; second, these incendiary falsehoods have created an emotional, angry, polarized electorate making meaningful substantive debate on the issues impossible, thereby stifling the lifeblood of American democracy – the marketplace of ideas. Much of today’s debate appeals to the emotions; reasoned thought is a scarce commodity.
Much as it goes against my grain and the grain of most Americans, we have reached that point where to save our democracy, we must enact a Truth in Politics law. We can no longer depend on ethics or rational thought to save us from the demagogues.
Ronald L. Hirsch is a teacher, legal aid lawyer, survey researcher, nonprofit executive, consultant, composer, author, and volunteer. He is a graduate of Brown University and the University of Chicago Law School and the author of We Still Hold These Truths. Read more of his writing at www.PreservingAmericanValues.com
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.