Trump's Secret Weapon

Keep on lying until you are blue (or orange) in the face.

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Source : "The Economist", Cover, October 2016

From a very young age, Trump understood that truth is relative. In the “Art of the Deal”, he says, “I call it truthful hyperbole”[1] to explain his philosophy of promotion and mostly self-promotion. As recently as July 2021, he mentioned in a speech in Florida, “If you say it enough and keep saying it, they’ll start to believe you.” Coincidentally, Hitler’s Propaganda Minister, Joseph Goebbels, apparently stated: “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.” This is known as “the Big Lie” technique, which Hitler referred to specifically in Mein Kampf. However, he was using it primarily as a way to express his rabid antisemitism.[2] As we will see hereafter, this notion of the “Big Lie” will become very important to Trump at the end of his presidential mandate.

All politicians are “economical with the truth”. However, Trump has perfected the art of lying like no other or, to use one of his favourite expressions, “the likes of which nobody has ever seen”. But herein lies the secret of his success. It is a practice he has adopted throughout his business career and probably even before. One must wonder if his affliction of bone spurs reflected reality or if it was a way to avoid being drafted for the Vietnam War.

To understand the underlying causes of any particular series of events or to better seize the essence of a specific epoch, any thought process has to be based on facts. How these facts are interpreted or analysed leaves space for various or alternative opinions. However, despite Kellyanne Conway’s firm belief in “alternative facts”,[3] such a concept is logically impossible unless we are simultaneously alive and dead in the realm of quantum physics with Schrödinger’s cat. Sorry to break it to Kellyanne Conway, but her reference to “alternative facts” is neither new nor original.

The classic Greek philosophers discussed the concept of alternative facts in detail. Aristotle believed that “To say of what is that it is not, or of what is not that it is, is false, while to say of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not, is true.”[4]  Simply put, the main characteristic of a fact is that it is demonstrably true, and thus, you can know it to be such. For Plato, facts are transcendent forms that constitute the basis of all knowledge, and importantly, they are not subjective and do not depend on the human mind to exist.

Unfortunately, perception can corrupt the definition of facts, making perception a reality. Demagogues understand this all too well and contrive to reinvent facts and refashion reality either by manipulating the media or simply by repeating a falsehood over and over again. George Orwell recognised this risk in his famous “1984” novel, with the notion of “Newspeak” and the “Ministry of Truth”.

Let us rely on Plato’s and Aristotle’s definitions of facts and avoid referring to “fake news” (ironically first coined in the political debate by Hilary Clinton only to be picked up by Donald Trump a few days later and then by constant repetition becoming an integral part of his trademark vocabulary).

The natural tendency to either vastly exaggerate reality or defend clear falsehoods may appear to be humorous or anecdotal when talking about the size of the crowd at his inauguration (although one can imagine that Sean Spicer did not consider it particularly funny at the time). Still, when it refers to a more fundamental issue, such as the results of an election, then the consequences are far more critical. Hence the perfect expression, “the Big Lie,” when referring to Trump’s apparent conviction that the 2020 election was rigged, respectively stolen.

Trump is not particularly discrete regarding his strategy; he tends to announce his intentions clearly in advance. In anticipation of the 2020 elections, similar to his approach just before 2016, he repeatedly declared that he could only lose if the elections were rigged. In 2020, he had the advantage of blaming the many post-in ballots due to the COVID crisis. Once again, Bill Maher reflected on this and correctly saw this as evidence of Trump’s desire to cling to power by any means possible. Trevor Noah, host of The Daily Show at the time, also latched onto this:[5] “A peaceful transfer of power is the cornerstone of a healthy democracy (…), And by Trump saying that he refuses to leave peacefully, he’s basically threatening a coup.” Little did he know then, but that threat soon became a reality after the election.

Hannah Arendt

 "Truthfulness has never been counted among the political virtues, and lies have always been regarded as justifiable tools in political dealings."

Cynics will say that Trump is not the first politician to lie and that lying is second nature to all people seeking public office. “No one has ever doubted that truth and politics are on rather bad terms with each other, and no one, as far as I know, has ever counted truthfulness among the political virtues.”[6]  Thus wrote Hannah Arendt in response to the international outcry against her book “Eichmann in Jerusalem”, where she coined the phrase “the banality of evil” after witnessing first-hand Adolf Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem in 1961. The German American historian and philosopher is well-known for her body of work detailing the origins of totalitarianism, having experienced it first-hand as a Jew forced to flee Nazi Germany in 1933.

In her opinion, we can shout truth to power until we are blue (or orange) in the face, and people who seek truth, the so-called “truth-seekers” to use her terminology, are outliers and do not exist in the world of politics. Politics and truth do not speak the same language.

Arendt wrote extensively on the subject, notably in an essay she wrote for the New York Review of Books on November 18th 1971, following the scandal of the Pentagon Papers, where she explains that contrary to a faulty memory, or being the victim of an illusion, the ability to deny in word and in thought whatever happens to be the actual truth is an “active, aggressive capability of ours”.

Despite the difficulties and the quandary described above, Arendt also advocates for “making facts appeal to people who do indeed have different opinions. Because facts do not stand by themselves. (…) Conceptually, we may call truth what we cannot change. (…) metaphorically, it is the ground on which we stand and the sky that stretches above us.” Ironically, she would be horrified to discover that today one of the fastest-growing movements is “the flat earth movement”. Recent polling in 2016 showed that 6% of Americans were not sure the earth was not flat, and 1% believed it was flat.[7] It seems that even Mother Earth is not safe from the most ridiculous and factually debunked conspiracy theories.

Just as the flat earthers are adamant in their truth, Trump is consistent in the self-deception of the Big Lie, victim, as Arendt would say of” the combination of the arrogance of power and the arrogance of the mind”, i.e. an “utterly irrational confidence in the calculability of reality”. Is this the type of president best suited for defending democracy?

One of the key points of Arendt’s theory is that moral outrage is not the best solution to lying in politics, as this is precisely what such lies try to achieve. Namely, it becomes part of the vicious circle whereby increased outrage encourages more outrageous lies, thus creating a world of defactualized politics. Simply calling out a politician for lying does not suffice and is counterproductive. Trump is a master of lying and mendacity and understands this too well.

This is one reason why some networks, contrary to their approach in the 2016 campaign, have adopted a far more restrictive policy, and rightly so, in covering Trump’s speeches and declarations on his Truth Social platform.

To mark the US Bicentennial, Arendt wrote likewise in the New York Review of Books in June  1975 an essay, “Home to Roost: A Bicentennial Address”, where she applies the idiomatic expression “chickens come home to roost” in the political field, meaning, in her own words, “it indicates the boomerang effect, the unexpected and ruinous backfiring of evil deeds on the doer”. She was referring to the aftermath of the Watergate scandal, but in today’s context, her last published words are particularly relevant. If she were alive today, she would be horrified at the emergence of the Trump phenomenon.

When democracy is at stake and when the barbaric threat of fascism is at the gates, speaking truth to power, however futile it may be, is indispensable. Let the chickens come home to roost at Mar-a-Lago.

[1] ”The Art of the Deal”, p 60.

[2] “Big Lie”, European Centre for Populism Studies, www.populismstudies.org/Vocabulary/big-lie/

[3] Interview on ”meet the press”, MSNBC, January 22, 2017

[4] Metaphysics, 1011b25

[5] Laura Zornosa: ”Bill Maher, Bernie Sanders and Trevor Noah fear Trump won’t leave if he loses”, Los Angeles Times, September 28, 2020, www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/story/2020-09-28/bill-maher-bernie-sanders-and-trevor-noah-fear-trump-wont-leave-if-he-loses

[6] Truth and Politics by Hannah Arendt; Initially published in The New Yorker, February 25, 1967, and reprinted with minor changes in Between Past and Future (1968) and The Portable Hannah Arendt edited by Peter Baier (2000)

[7] “Did you know that 1% of Americans believe the Earth is flat?”, Gazette 2.0, July 20, 2022, www.gazette20.com/post/did-you-know-that-1-of-americans-believe-the-earth-is-flat