Trump takes lying to whole new level
Among the many challenges Donald Trump’s presidency presents — to liberal trade, to international order, to constitutional government — perhaps the gravest is to reasoned discourse and rational inquiry; to our ability to debate matters from a common base of facts, or even to agree that facts matter; to the very notion of truth as the touchstone of public discourse.
The remarkable weekend performance by his press secretary, Sean Spicer, wherein he asserted what was plainly and verifiably false — that Trump’s inauguration had drawn the largest crowd in history — is a reminder of how grave the threat is. Spicer’s edict, after all, was plainly on orders of his boss, intended to reinforce Trump’s claim that “a million and a half” people had been present; his own claims were in turn defended by Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway as “alternative facts.” Score that a tripling (quadrupling?) down on the same obvious absurdity.
The word “lie” may not adequately describe what is going on here. All presidents lie, at one point or another, some for reasons of state, some for less exalted causes. But what separates Trump is not the sheer volume of falsehoods that pour forth from his mouth. It is that it does not seem to matter to him whether his audience believes them. A lie, after all, is a statement that the speaker not only knows to be false, but intends should be believed; as such, the falsehood must be of a kind that is not easily discovered. In the same way that hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue, deceit honours truth by its efforts to conceal it. It has the decency, at least, to sneak in by the back door, not parade through the front.
But Trump’s lies are not of that kind. As the relatively trivial example of the inauguration crowds makes clear, they are evidently, noisily, gaudily untrue. Yet it is clear they are not intended to be disbelieved, either, like the tall tales of a storyteller. Of course, it’s always possible that Trump himself is simply unable to distinguish between fact and fiction, or can’t be bothered to try. But the darker possibility is that the conflation is deliberate, not with the intention of deceiving, of substituting false for true, but of disrupting our ability to tell the two apart, or indeed, by advertising how vast is his own unconcern for the distinction, to lead us in time to be as indifferent, if only out of fatigue. It is to knock truth out of the ring altogether, to demolish it as a criterion by which he is to be judged.
“This was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration.”
“We have always been at war with Eurasia.”
There may be other purposes to be achieved. As Garry Kasparov, the Russian chess master and dissident, has observed, “obvious lies serve a purpose for an administration. They watch who challenges them and who loyally repeats them.”
They are a way of testing allegiance, or indeed of cementing it: having crossed the line that just weeks before, in a public forum, he had vowed never to cross, Spicer is now wholly Trump’s boy. Whatever qualms he might once have held about such conduct, he cannot raise them now, even to himself, without confronting his own hypocrisy.
But if the purpose is to sow confusion in the public, the strategy must be counted a success. Certainly among Trump’s own supporters, it is absolute: where the media presents evidence of the untruthfulness of his claims, their reaction is not to doubt their leader but to accuse the media of bias; that so much of the media is critical of him, on this and other scores, does not suggest to them that he is particularly deserving of criticism, but merely the universality of the bias. Hence the “liberal media,” a term that now embraces the National Review, the Weekly Standard, and the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal.
People who believe this — and they are everywhere online — congratulate themselves on having shed their illusions, of being wise to the “lying media.” But just as there is a difference between a lie and a deliberate, open assertion of an untruth, so there is a difference between skepticism — awareness that what one is being told may or may not be true — and a blanket assertion that it must be false. The latter is just as credulous, in its own way, as its contrary, believing everything you read. It is in fact a form of conspiracy theory.
This radical disbelief is, after all, not limited to the media. It applies now to every source of authority or expertise. If the vast majority of climate scientists subscribe to the anthropogenic consensus, it cannot be taken to suggest that is the most likely hypothesis, but because they have been paid off, or at best deluded. If the vast majority of economists support free trade, that, too, must be taken as evidence the theory is false, to be rejected not in spite of their expertise but because of it. The polls, of course, are always wrong, or rather wrong whenever they conflict with what it is preferable to believe.
The media, God knows, get lots of things wrong. We hunt in packs, succumb to groupthink, fall for the latest faddish beliefs. But “getting things wrong” is not the same as “telling me things I don’t want to hear,” nor are honest mistakes to be equated with deliberate lies, as a mature understanding of the world would acknowledge.
THEY ARE A WAY OF TESTING ALLEGIANCE, OR INDEED OF CEMENTING IT.