Buehler hopes that in seeing the lies laid out there, voters will be able to overcome their sense of desensitization and reclaim a sense of shock and outrage. “In some ways, seeing it is believing,” he said. “30,000 is just a number. Like Stalin said, one death is a tragedy, 10m is a statistic. Remember when just one lie from a politician would make the news? It’s kind of meaningless now. People can’t catch Trump on things because people don’t care any more. But when you see the wall, it’s a dramatic display of the enormity of it.”
In addition to a tool to help restore some of the shock value of Trump’s lies, Buehler’s Wall of Lies and Wall of Liars and Deniers have become places of community processing and connection. Buehler stated that lots of people come up and tell him “thank you” and share feelings of anxiety around the election and the enormous numbers of voters who believe Trump’s big lie that the election was stolen. “Someone told me, ‘you hear about the big lie, but when you see how many people are spreading it, and on top of all the other lies Trump told, it hits you in a new way. You’re not just reading it, it’s visualized, that brings it to the forefront.’”
As Buehler sees it, if there’s any silver lining to the emergence of Trump as a political force, it’s that his presidency has shaken off a sense of complacency. As evidence, he points to the art world, which he says has become much more political since Trump came into office. Buehler also believes that the generation that came of age during Trump has been permanently changed. “This has impacted a whole generation,” he said. “This is here forever, this concern about how our country can get hijacked.”
