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DOGE and the Trump Propaganda Machine [1]
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Date: 2025-03-03
As Trump’s billionaire buddy Elon Musk rampages through the federal government, indiscriminately shredding agency after agency, his so-called Department of Government Efficiency or DOGE—AKA Musk’s “woodchipper for bureaucracy”—is busy blasting out misinformation about its alleged findings, including bogus statistics about the federal workforce, fake examples of fraud and waste, and phony claims about the savings that DOGE is supposedly achieving with its unchecked gutting of federal agencies.
In a recent podcast episode, The Bulwark's Tim Miller and guest Angelo Carusone from Media Matters discussed (among other things) the way that these lies get amplified by the right-wing media ecosystem, especially by Trump’s personal propaganda channel Fox News.
For example, DOGE’s audaciously inaccurate boast that it had already saved US taxpayers $55 billion was repeated by Fox News at least 87 times in a single week. The false and easily debunkable claim that tens of millions of dead people were receiving Social Security checks was repeated by Fox News 43 times in a single day.
Listening to that discussion sparked a realization. More than anything, the primary function of DOGE is to be a high-profile PR operation, a key source of agitprop in an ongoing disinformation campaign. In other words, it’s an arm of Trump’s vast, endlessly churning propaganda machine.
Trump and Musk’s Authoritarian Propaganda Playbook
Much has been written about how Trump has used propaganda throughout his political career to distort public perception, control the media, and attack democratic norms in ways that chillingly echo the authoritarian tactics used by some of history’s most notorious dictators.
Thinking about how propaganda works sheds light on the role that DOGE plays in Trump’s massive, ongoing disinformation campaign.
Writing in 2016 about then-candidate Trump, Yale philosophy professor Jason Stanley observed that the “goal of totalitarian propaganda is to sketch out a consistent system that is simple to grasp, one that both constructs and simultaneously provides an explanation for grievances against various out-groups.”
One way that authoritarian propagandists like Trump do that is by using lies and repetition to systematically associate a targeted group with sinister imagery and negative stereotypes so as to create a desired narrative.
Recall, for example, Trump’s repeated use of dehumanizing rhetoric and scaremongering conspiracy theories to justify his far-right extremist views about immigration. The point is to construct a perceived reality (e.g., immigration is an existential threat to the country) that justifies the actions the authoritarian independently wants to take (e.g., mass deportations).
Trump’s propaganda campaign didn’t just succeed in pushing public opinion rightward on immigration, as reported by Andrew Mangan. It also succeeded in setting the very terms for debate, the very framing of the issue. Thus, so much of the news commentary simply presupposed rather than critically examined Trump’s preferred narrative—that the immigration issue was a weakness for Democrats in general and Kamala Harris in particular, that there was in fact such an urgent crisis at the border in the first place.
How DOGE Fuels the Trump Propaganda Machine
In the case of DOGE, Trump and Co. are following the same playbook. Gutting the federal government through mass purges of civil servants was the plan from the start. DOGE is key to creating a fabricated reality that Trump can use to justify those cuts—a fabricated reality according to which federal workers are lazy leeches on the system and the federal government is a bloated mess of waste and fraud.
Trump began spinning that narrative on the campaign trail, using extreme rhetoric to demonize civil servants: “They’re destroying this country. They’re crooked people, they’re dishonest people. They’re going to be held accountable.” But abstract rhetoric only goes so far. DOGE brings the narrative home by providing concrete talking points that can be tweeted and retweeted, picked up by the media, and amplified by the right-wing echo chamber. Each alleged discovery drives in one more nail in the coffin of the federal government’s reputation. In fact, independently of any alleged findings, the mere existence of DOGE serves to reinforce Trump and Musk’s desired narrative by seeming to confirm that the federal government is something shady needing to be investigated in the first place.
It doesn’t matter that so many of DOGE’s claims are patently false and easily debunkable. By the time the fact-checkers get there, it’s too late. Underpinning the success of propaganda is a psychological phenomenon known as the illusory truth effect: when people hear the same false information repeated again and again, they often come to believe it is true. Hitler’s chief propagandist Joseph Goebbels knew this well. “Repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth,” he reportedly said.
According to researchers, misinformation is especially resistant to fact-checking when it appears to confirm the pre-existing political, religious, or social beliefs central to a person's sense of identity. In fact, attempts to correct misinformation may actually end up strengthening people’s false beliefs. That’s why authoritarian propaganda so often works to promote an “us versus them” dynamic that strengthens people’s investment in the social group with which they identify. By appealing directly to people’s emotions and sense of identity, propaganda manages to bypass or short-circuit their capacity for logical thought and rational scrutiny.
That’s also why authoritarians are so prone to spreading conspiracy theories, which are likewise notoriously resilient to debunking because of the way they create an interconnected system of self-reinforcing beliefs.
Hannah Arendt, who famously analyzed the mass propaganda tactics of 20th-century totalitarian leaders in The Origins of Totalitarianism, put the point like this: “What convinces masses are not facts, and not even invented facts, but only the consistency of the system of which they are presumably part.” When you’ve branded the press as “fake news” and your political opponents as “the enemies within” in a vast deep state conspiracy, then every fact-check is taken by your supporters as a corroboration of the conspiracy, reinforcing your system of beliefs.
The Limits of Fact-Checking, the Power of Storytelling
It is of course still crucial to continue setting the record straight by thoroughly fact-checking all the false claims spewed by the Trump regime. But given how resistant propaganda is to debunking, fact-checking will never be enough to counter the lies. More effective are real-life stories with an emotional appeal, stories that can penetrate the propaganda bubble by presenting an alternative narrative, one that reminds people of deeper values they still hold, such as compassion, fairness, and decency—values that Trump and Musk are trying very hard to erase.
Andrew Mangan’s piece on anti-immigration polling trends illustrates the power of such stories. Although surveys show an increase in anti-immigrant views in the abstract, when voters are presented with concrete stories that humanize the people involved, far fewer voters support hard-line stances.
In the case of DOGE, real-life, humanizing stories about federal workers can counter the phony narrative Trump and Musk are trying to construct, exposing the sheer ridiculousness of their caricature of government workers as either useless parasites sucking up public resources or nefarious deep state operatives.
Such stories can highlight the vital work that civil servants do in everything from aviation safety to medical research to emergency relief. They remind us of all the basic services we depend on that federal workers handle, including processing social security payments, issuing passports, and keeping our national parks clean. They show that the federal government is not some abstract bogeyman but a network of millions of workers spread across the nation, 80 percent of whom are outside of the DC “swamp”—workers who include not just bureaucrats with cushy desk jobs but also welders, pipe fitters, plumbers, mechanics, electricians, and many, many others.
Most importantly, such stories help remind Americans of the positive meaning traditionally associated with government workers, the meaning that Trump and Musk’s authoritarian propaganda machine is trying to destroy—the idea of being a public servant working for the common good.
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