Donald Trump Is Bad At Lying

Fascist lies are sometimes more compulsive than strategic.

Image credit: RCraig09, CC

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I wrote about Elon Musk yesterday and how his apparent confessions are often just lies that he thinks advance his goals of hate, abuse, and genocide.

Recognizing that fascists lie is important. I think it’s also important, though, to realize that fascist lies aren’t always part of a dastardly plan—much less part of a successful dastardly plan. Consider, for example, Trump’s lies about his slush fund—the $1.8 billion he wants to hand out to supporters who helped him stage his (ultimately successful) coup.

The money would likely go to people who participated directly in the January 6 insurrection, including people who targeted or assaulted police officers. This was too much for Senate Republicans facing a grim midterm season; they revolted en masse, derailing an already long-delayed vote on ICE funding. The pushback was so intense that Trump’s sycophantic, worm-like Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche oozed up to a microphone and announced that Trump had abandoned the idea.

That should in theory be that. But! There are doubts. First of all, Blanche refused to put in writing the promise to drop the insurrection fund. And then, when Trump was asked about the fund in a White House interview, he refused to disavow it. Instead, he said, “I love [the fund]. I think it’s so important,” and insisted that the only reason it wasn’t moving forward was that “a radical left judge ruled against it.” He also said that he was going to release information in the coming weeks showing that the insurrectionists had been unfairly prosecuted and demonstrating that they should be compensated.

Obviously Trump is lying here. Either he (through Blanche) is falsely telling Congress that he has abandoned the weaponization scheme in order to get the Senate to pass his ICE funding. Or he is falsely telling reporters that he has not abandoned the weaponization scheme because he wants to sound tough.

Either way, if he is attempting to reassure Congress and get them to pass his budget, issuing garbled contradictory statements like this is incredibly counter-productive. Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Chuck Grassley, a hard-core Trumpist and dingbat, said on Monday that, to get the bill moving, “the president has to say very explicitly that there’s not going to be a weaponization fund.” And instead, the president had his spokes-turd half disavow it, and then Trump himself started babbling about how he loves the weaponization fund the way he never loved his stupid children. That’s not going to cut it.

Trump has no commitment in any way to the truth. So why not just respond to reporters by saying, “You know Congress wasn’t willing, so we’re not going to do that,” and then attempt to find the money elsewhere, or come back to it in six months, or whatever? Why babble about how you’re going to release evidence when there’s no evidence to release? Why derail your own bill?

The thing about Trump is he does not really lie strategically. He just spews what philosopher Harry Frankfurt terms “bullshit”—speech intended to persuade without regard to truth. But where Frankfurt sees this persuasive speech as directed at others, Trump’s speech often seems intended to persuade himself.

Sometimes Trump will say things that he hopes will convince others. But his primary audience always seems to be his own brain, as he ceaselessly repeats to himself that he is the greatest and the best and that everything he does is perfect. We are always tuning into the same internal monologue, issuing forth from the same orifice like noxious fumes from a gaping abyss.

Trump’s people told him he had to tell the Senate what it wanted to hear, and he did because he’s happy to lie or have other people lie for him. But when asked about the fund directly, he just asserts that all his ideas are great and that his people are persecuted and that he will win, because that is what he’s always asserting and he has no interest in stopping.

These lies aren’t strategic—in some sense they aren’t even lies, since Trump probably doesn’t exactly know, or even care, whether he’s going to move ahead with the weaponization fund. He wants it to happen but more than that he just wants to believe it’s going to happen. He wants his ICE funding to move ahead in the Senate, but even more than that he wants to tell himself it’s moving ahead in the Senate. If these are irreconcilable goals, he just shrugs and asserts whatever is most convenient or comfortable for him in whatever venue he happens to be, even if everybody can watch him contradict himself in real time.

Being willing to lie all the time can sometimes confer some advantages; you can argue that Trump the lying campaigner benefited from the fact that people would just pick and choose among his lying statements to convince themselves that he would do whatever they happened to want him to do on (for example) Iran.

But there are also obvious downsides when your own allies and negotiating partners (in, for example, Iran) know they can’t trust anything you say. And there are even more downsides when you are so mired in your own fantasies of revenge and persecution and power that you think those fantasies are all there are, and that the world conforms to your whim because you say so. That’s how you lose Congressional support. It’s how you lose wars.

People tend to believe that Trump has cognitive deficits which lead him to do evil things. But it’s the other way around. His moral choice to live in a world of lies, to refuse to listen to or learn from information that doesn’t flatter his ego, has left him disconnected from reality and unable to make elementary intellectual deductions like, “If we attack them, Iran might fight back,” or, “If you tell Senators that you are lying to them, they may not trust you.”

Fascists like to boast about their mastery of propaganda and their ability to sway the masses. But often the main people they are propagandizing are themselves, as they convince themselves they are masterful and powerful and flush with the support of the masses. Constantly telling yourself lies—about your own perfection, about the inferiority of those who aren’t as white and male as you, about the fact that you’re winning every war—can backfire. That’s how Hitler ended up shooting himself in a bunker. Even when he was finishing himself off, I’m sure that he, like Trump, was telling himself that he was awesome, impervious to the truth that he was a losing loser who had lost.