Why people see truth in Trump’s lies

When Robin Reames was growing up in Louisiana in the 1980s, an ideological rupture developed in her family that she now sees as a microcosm of today’s nationwide political divide. Her father, an evangelical Christian, was ardently Republican. Reames was drawn to feminism and liberal politics. She and her father constantly argued — at first in a good-spirited way, but eventually with hostility, because each of them was absolutely certain they were right. “By the time he passed away, several years had passed since we had been able to have even a civil conversation,” Reames writes in a new book.

Why was each of them unable to see anything the way the other person did?

Now a professor at the University of IllinoisChicago, Reames thinks she knows the answer, and it’s the basis of her new book, “The Ancient Art of Thinking for Yourself: The Power of Rhetoric in Polarized Times.”

Rhetoric is essentially the study of persuasion. If you think about how the grammar of a text can be analyzed — here are the nouns, here are the verbs, and so on — something similar is possible with a rhetorical analysis: Here this speaker is deploying facts, here she is marshaling logic, here she is appealing to emotion.

But Reames’s book is not a guide to winning debates. It is much more than that. It shows how all of us — liberal feminists and evangelical Republicans alike — come to believe certain things. Her insights help explain why conspiracy theories are nearly impossible to dislodge with facts. And by learning to see rhetoric in action, Reames says, we can truly think for ourselves instead of just being “a relay station for other people’s opinions.”

My interview with Reames has been edited and condensed.

Who is the intended audience for this book? I’m sure there are a lot of people who want to have better conversations with their family members or other ideological opponents. But do you really think many people want to challenge their own thinking or that of their political tribe?

I would like for there to be more people who are interested in testing and challenging their own opinions. Maybe I want to inspire people to do that.

My late teens and early 20s was the turning point when I decided I didn’t want to just accept uncritically and dogmatically the things that I’d been taught to believe but to question them. It was an experience of liberation.

It makes us feel vulnerable to think about even momentarily loosening our grip on the things that we want to believe are true, that we do believe are true, that we think ought to be true. But it’s enormously freeing to decide to carve a space open where free, open-ended inquiry can take place.

The liberation you describe came when you shed the conservative beliefs of your upbringing. But what positions have you become less liberal on through your study of rhetoric?

I would shift the question a little bit, because one of the real aims of thinking rhetorically is not to think in those terms, not to think as a conservative or as a liberal, but to ask a number of questions: What makes this idea seem true to me? What are the underlying presuppositions of this set of beliefs? What are they taking as unassailable and for granted? How are my emotions being evoked by this conversation? What in the language is evoking those emotions? What does evoking those emotions make me feel more prone to do?

I think someone going through that exercise could wind up congratulating themselves rather than finding new ways to see politics. I can imagine someone saying “What presuppositions lead me to this progressive stance? Oh, it’s clearly my wonderful belief in the value of equality.”

That certainly could be one outcome. In my experience, generally the outcome is that we hold our beliefs with slightly lighter hands. It makes it possible to understand how a viewpoint that would seem to be abhorrent might be seen as legitimate in the eyes of other people.

That brings us to Donald Trump. His supporters see him as the ultimate teller of courageous truths, while most other people see him as a brazen liar. You write in your book that if you analyze Trump rhetorically, both of those views of him can be correct. How is that so?

Both of those views can be correct because each of those two views is operating with a different basic assumption about what truth is. And that doesn’t mean “Oh, it’s all relative, man.”

It means that the people who believe that Trump is a liar, who say “things that he says are factually incorrect, they’re lies, they’re deception,” are dealing with a notion of truth that’s rooted in the Greek tradition. It traces to Plato, who thought about language corresponding to some physical reality in the world. Plato took a prior notion of truth and a prior notion of language and transformed them so that at the end of the day, people — and especially politicians — could be held to account for the things that they said.

The earlier notion of truth, before Plato, was in the oral tradition. In that tradition, truth was seen to function by bringing things to light, by showing things for what they were. So the concept of true and false wasn’t a natural dichotomy prior to Plato. The natural dichotomy was [between] true and hidden. When the Greeks were in the middle of this transition from one form of truth to another, a writer named Alcidamas pointed out that something is lost when people stop speaking spontaneously and start reading prepared speeches. That prepared speech, that language on the page, refers to something in the world, but it’s no longer the spontaneous act of this person just putting themselves on display, showing us who they are, laying it all bare, revealing the world to us.

These older notions of truth have never fully gone away. We may think of truth and language in different ways now, because Plato and the Western tradition that followed him taught us to, but that doesn’t erase this older sense that truth somehow is at work when people speak spontaneously, off the cuff. As Trump supporters like to say, Trump’s rhetorical strength was his off-the-cuff-ness, his spontaneity, his extemporaneity. And so when people are responding to that and calling it truth, they’re not altogether wrong.

Are you saying that the truth in his extemporaneity is what he’s revealing about himself and the way he thinks, the way he sees the world — not the factual valence of the things he’s saying?

Yeah, precisely. His truth is being experienced as a kind of revealing, in that ancient sense, because he’s not obscuring it behind a script. He’s just putting those words out there.

So in a pure rhetorical analysis, could you say he’s being honest about the fact that he’s a liar?

A more careful way of putting it would be that he’s being truthful under a different historical definition of truth, because I don’t think he’s being honest about the fact that he’s a liar.

But he’s accurately revealing that he’s a bullshitter?

That might be a safer way of putting it. But I’d be more comfortable saying that what we’re dealing with is two different notions of truth, both of which have deep historical roots for us in the West.

You talk about these two species of truth. How many are there?

Well, I’ve only studied two so far. I’m working on what could be considered a third right now, so maybe get back to me in two years and I’ll have that one more worked out.