It is a truth universally acknowledged that no one can believe a single fucking word Donald Trump says. To paraphrase Mary McCarthy (referring to Lillian Hellman), every word he says is a lie, including “and” and “the.” We know this.
In fact, so consistent and relentless has his lying been, that anyone (including us) writing about him over the past, oh, ten years, has perforce (whatever that means) engaged in a study, not only of morality (lying is bad, Trump lies, ergo Trump is bad), but also epistemology: How, everyone started asking in 2016, can we say we know he’s lying? Maybe he really believes the obviously false crap he spews all day, every day. That doesn’t make him a liar. It just makes him a stupid idiot.
But as the presidential campaign of 2016 unfolded, it became apparent to everyone (except New Yorkers, for whom this had been apparent for years) that, like the famous floor wax/dessert topping, he was both. He was, and remains, a stupid idiot and a congenital liar.
Mainstream media were no strangers to this issue; they had already spent eight years studiously avoiding calling George W. Bush a liar by fogging up the vicinity with the teargas of disingenuousness. If Bush said, out loud in public, “Saddam Hussein eats babies for lunch,” the New York Times, rather than run the headline “Bush Lies About Saddam’s Diet,” would run, “Bush’s Claim About Saddam’s Meals Raises Eyebrows.” The Prestige Press™ defaulted to repeating the lie up top (in heds and sub-heds), and maybe debunking it six paragraphs down with “Experts agree that the claim is without merit.” Guess which piece of info made more of an impact.
Bush’s presidency was, if not a Golden Age of lying, certainly a Silver one—so much so that it inspired Harry G. Frankfurt’s indispensable On Bullshit, published in 2005, in which he pointed out the important distinctions between b.s. and lying.
When it comes to lying, though, we live in whatever Age is even more resplendent than Golden. Donald Trump makes the George W. from Texas seem like the George W. who (purportedly) confessed to chopping down the cherry tree. And, like Bush, Trump gets away with it. He, too, has received this kind of yeah-but, pussyfooting, benefit-of-the-doubt media coverage his entire political career.
(True, by the end of Trump’s first term, even the Washington Post bestirred itself to publish a multiple-page documentation of the over 30,000 lies Trump told. And it called them “lies”! Ah, those were the days. We were miserable, aye, but we were happy.)
We know this. But here’s something else we know: We have entered a new phase.
What Trump says these days—in public, but probably also in private—can no longer even be called lying. Let us, with a hat-tip to Frankfurt, anatomize various kinds of untruths. There may be others, but for starters we have—
Normal lying--Knowingly saying something false with the intent to deceive others. The liar is cognizant of your respect for the truth, which it seeks to hijack and replacing the real truth with his fake truth, i.e., lie.
Bullshitting—Being indifferent to truth itself in order to impress, overwhelm, or to smother or evade inquiry. The bullshitter, for whom the idea of truth is irrelevant, can’t even be bothered to pretend to be credible. He doesn’t cheat at chess; he knocks over the board and says, “I win.” If you don’t agree, he doesn’t care. That’s your problem.
Ad hoc lying—Untruths told on the fly, invented moment by moment, regardless of how consistent they are or aren’t with what he said yesterday or five minutes ago. The Chinese proverb, “A liar must have a good memory” doesn’t apply. The intent isn’t even to deceive. It’s to swat away questions, block challenges, and shut up the enemy.
Confabulating, i.e., being delusional,believing your own lies, making shit up without the capacity to know (let alone acknowledge) that you’re making shit up. This is psychotic. It may not be Norman-Bates-in-Psycho psychotic, but it’s demented. Because it’s inadvertent. The confabulator can’t help himself and doesn’t know that, either.
IT’S NATIONAL ROOT BEER FLOAT DAY AND NATIONAL WIGGLE YOUR TOES DAY. DON’T FALL FOR IT. DON’T DRINK A ROOT BEER FLOAT, AND FOR GOD’S SAKE DON’T WIGGLE YOUR TOES. INSTEAD, BUY THE SPLIT.
With Trump, we long ago entered the Ad hoc phase—saying whatever he deems necessary to shut up the reporter and move to the next one. We see this literally every day. From the New Republic this past Monday:
President Donald Trump claimed Monday he was in talks to open the Strait of Hormuz “literally by tomorrow”—while Iran has denied speaking to the United States.
Speaking at a press conference to sign an executive order, Trump rambled about ongoing talks with Iran to reopen the strait.
“It’s not very complex. We’re talking about the strait, the opening of the strait, having it open, literally by tomorrow. Completely open,” Trump said.
(snip)
But Esmaeil Baghaei, spokesperson for Iran’s foreign ministry, told reporters Monday that Iran was not currently in talks with the U.S. He said Iran was in the final stages of discussions with Oman to open the strait.
And if you’re tempted to think, “Well, maybe he was told that by his people, and he has no way of knowing that it isn’t true,” we have his quote from the same day: “My REAL poll numbers are the best they have ever been.” In fact, across the board, from Fox News to Pew Research, they are the worst they have ever been.
And then there’s the Reflecting Pool. Trump has banged on about it’s having been vandalized by thugs with box cutters when there are no witnesses to such a thing, no video of such a thing, no physical evidence of such a thing, and, let’s be serious, no possible way that could have happened. When Jeanine Pirro showed him the government’s own evidence that the damage was the result of incompetent work, he dismissed it out of hand. Top psychologists call that “krazee.”
We suppose it’s possible that poor Donald Trump is being systematically deceived and lied to by his staff, and so is saying these preposterous things in good faith. Mind you, neither we, our significant others, nor our household pets believe that. But it’s possible.
Of course, you’d have to extend this they’re-deceiving-him theory to his Cabinet, his spokespeople, and his advisors, since every one of them lies their ass(es) off every day, too. Scott Bessant, Kevin Hasset. Marco Rubio. Howard Lutnik. Todd Blanche. And, last but not least, RFK, Jr., who is like a Tolkien villain who stepped off the screen and put on a $2,000 suit. In other words, the entire Florsheim Mafia. Or Florsheim Cabal. Or Florsheim Gang. Or Florsheim (your suggestion here).
Behold CNN’s Dana Bash querying Kennedy about the 2020 COVID outbreak and the lockdown it triggered:
BASH: Does President Trump also deserve some of the blame?
KENNEDY: Well, President Trump, as you recall, wanted to end the lockdowns. […] The thing that did the most damage to our country was the lockdowns, lockdowns that shut down 3.5 million businesses in our country with no due process, no just compensation, all of our churches, closed our schools, and our children are still paying the price for that.
And here is fellow Wonketeer Michael Mora’s retort:
I know it’s hard for RFK Jr. to remember, perhaps due to the worm-tunnel-shaped holes in his temporal lobe, but the first global COVID lockdowns began in January 2020. The first lockdowns in the US started in mid-March, including the federal government’s “15 days to slow the spread” campaign, but lockdowns themselves happened on local and state levels. This is confirmed even by the MAHA-fucked timeline on the CDC’s own website. There was no moment when Tyrant Fauci was forcibly locking down the country and Donald Trump couldn’t stop him.
So. We have a president who not only can’t stop lying, he probably doesn’t know that he is lying. He is completely surrounded by courtiers and lapdogs who repeat his lies without hesitation or shame. Everything the government says—to the press, to the public, to Congress—should be assumed to be a lie. (Lying to Congress is a crime, but until Dems at least take the House, forget enforcement of that.) And even if sometimes it suits them to tell what is, in fact, the truth, both common sense and an interest in pragmatic efficiency should prompt us not to believe it, and to force them to make us believe it.
The question then becomes: Under these circumstances, what should we do? And who’s “we”?
Well, first of all, we’re us—i.e., you, us, the informed citizenry, and the people of the nation of the American people. And what we should do—to the extent that we haven’t done it already, which we so have—is acknowledge that most corporate news media are slaves to the sick-o tautology of “access.” They book liars, and thank them for their mendacity, so they can do it again. Their rationale for, say, featuring RFK, Jr. on CNN or Scott Bessant on Meet the Press, is: “Yes, we know they’re lying. But we can’t call them out on it and say, ‘You’re lying,’ because if we do, they’ll never come back on our shows and we’ll lose access. To their lies.”
So here’s the first thing to do if you haven’t done it already: don’t watch. Don’t watch in droves. Any show that interviews anyone in the administration should be not-watched with extreme prejudice. There are plenty of trustworthy outlets (like Wonkette!) to bring you up to date, should these hideous people accidentally not lie.
Besides, everyone knows how emotionally and psychically scarring it is to watch an interview in which the subject blithely lies to your face and suffers no pushback. One yells at the tv, the computer screen, the phone. And it’s not enough. So you yell at the dog, the kids, the spouse, the police at the door who have been called by the frightened neighbors. It’s a bad scene, man.
And speaking of hideous people, what about press conferences with our own Baghdad Bobbie, Carolyin’ Leavitt? It goes w/out saying we should not pay attention to them, but there is an additional imperative. The reporters who are not Trump-friendly shills from Fox News, OAN, etc. should, when she answers their questions with blatant bullshit and propaganda, respond as we would, with something witty, like, “That’s blatant bullshit and propaganda.” Also, we can’t wait for someone to ask, “Caroline, are you ever going to stop lying to us?”
Absent that, reporters should heckle her, undermine her composure by calling out spirited rejoinders like “Sez you!” and “Your father’s moustache!” and, in the especially egregious cases in which she gets all indignant and moralistic, everyone (either in unison or one by one) should yell, “Kiss my ass, bitch!” AND WALK OUT.
Or not. Write your own “script.” The point is that—here it comes—we live in a version of Splitsville (our term for a geo-political entity harboring two or more distinct “nations”) in which one nation consists, not only of Donald Trump, but of all the Republicans in Federal, state, and local government and their corporate and religious supporters, all of whom either are abject liars or by default should, at this point, be considered as such.
Unfair? Reductive? Unhelpfully partisan? Fuck you. Don’t blame us. Blame Trump and the GOP.
The other nation consists of everyone else: Democrats, Independents, Social Democrats, Democratic Socialists, Anti-Social Democrats, Republican voters, whiny incels, MAGA chuds, loathsome groypers, Nazi scum, Q-anon numpties, manosphere assholes, huffy Redditors, ridiculous looksmaxxers—
“Wait. What? You’re grouping us with them?”
Yes. Because they, just as much as we, have been and are being lied to every day, about everything. And not just us and them. This version of Splitsville encompasses the entire world. There is the mad dictator Trump and his vile regime, who lie to and about literally everyone on Earth—even Trump’s political allies. (Just ask Georgia Meloni.) Everyone else is in the same boat, one enormous ark that you and we share with Tucker Carlson, Nick Fuentes, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Anthony Fauci, the world champion New York Knicks, and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.
Donald Trump is a big fat liar surrounded and abetted by big fat and little skinny liars, and the sooner they’re all six feet under in the dust bin of History, the better. And that’s the truth.
IN THE SPLIT WE ASK, “WHAT WOULD HAPPEN IF (WHEN?) THE RED STATES LEAVE THE USA AND FORM THEIR OWN NATION? WOULD IT BE COMEDY GOLD OR ABSOLUTE DISASTER?” (SPOILER: YES!)
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