Fascists Lie

Of course Trump was not really committed to peace

“I’m not going to start a war. I’m going to stop wars,” Trump promised in his election night victory speech in November 2024. That was in line with his longstanding criticism of violent foreign intervention and particularly of Bush-style regime-change wars in the Middle East.

And yet, this week, for the second time in less than a year, Trump unilaterally and unconstitutionally bombed Iran in a war of choice and a war of aggression—specifically targeting and killing Iran’s leader.

The move has been criticized across the political spectrum, including by many who have been staunch Trump defenders in the past. Former Congresswoman and rabid MAGA loyalist Marjorie Taylor Greene blasted Trump, declaring that “it feels like the worst betrayal this time because it comes from the very man and the admin who we all believed was different.” Tireless anti-anti-Trump crusader Glenn Greenwald frothed that “Trump made opposition to regime-change wars a central part of his political identity for a decade” and raged “He’s proven himself one of the most deceitful frauds in US history.” Polished fascist propagandist Tucker Carlson, gutter conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, and misogynist rape enthusiast Andrew Tate all weighed in, accusing Trump of hypocrisy and two-facedness.

The pantomime of outrage by these assorted scumbags is exactly as convincing as Trump’s initial pantomime of pacifism. Anyone who claims to believe anything that Trump says is either a fool or a blackguard, and most likely both.

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Lies, Damn Lies, and Fascist Lies

If you has been paying attention to Donald Trump for the last 10-40 years, you should be aware that he simply lies about everything all the time. He lied about the Central Park Five, claiming that they had assaulted a jogger; he lied that Obama was not born in the US; he lied that Haitians in Springfield were eating pets; he lied that he won the 2020 election; he regularly lies about the size of the crowds he draws. Big things, small things, implausible things and wildly implausible things—Trump lies constantly and repulsively, like his own body odor emissions. It is one of the absolutely defining characteristics of his career and personality.

In addition to being a liar, Trump is a violent bigoted bully. He has been held liable for a vicious sexual assault on E. Jean Carroll; he goaded a mob to attack his own vice-president and cheered as they threatened to hang him; he unleashed a fascist gestapo on non-white people and immigrants throughout the US. You have to be a rube to believe anything Trump says, but you have to be the biggest fucking rube on earth to believe that he is a man of peace as he spreads chaos, death, and hate across the land.

Trump’s lies aren’t just personal quirks. They are a central part of his political practice and political philosophy. Trump is a fascist, and fascists are liars.

Most people are familiar with the idea of the fascist “big lie”—the idea that if you tell a whopper of sufficient size, its very audacity will overwhelm skepticism. But there’s less discussion of the way that fascism is built on a bedrock of falsehoods and deliberate defacement of the truth.

Fascists believe truth has no value. All they care about is power. For fascists, the righteous—white people, men, the wealthy, those at the top of the social hierarchy—have an obligation to use every and any method to seize power and exterminate their opponents. To deal with these opponents in good faith is a disgusting sign of weakness and moral turpitude. Fascists believe they have an obligation to lie when it suits their purposes, since those lies serve the higher truth of advancing white supremacy and smearing their inferiors.

Vice-president and Nazi goon J.D. Vance admitted as much on the campaign trail when he explained that he was spreading vicious falsehoods about Haitian immigrants because he had “to create stories so that the … media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people.” When Vance says “stories”, he means “lies”, when he says “the American people” he means some combination of white people and Trump supporters, and when he talks about those people “suffering” he means that they are irredeemably harmed by the existence of Black people and immigrants, who Vance wants to eliminate or exterminate.

For fascists, genocide is the highest moral value, and lies that get us closer to the cleansing fire are blessings, every one. And if like Trump you lose track of the line between false and true altogether in your dream of power and violence, all the better.

You can’t form a coalition with liars

The fact that people like Carlson and Marjorie Taylor Greene say they dislike foreign intervention has led some people supposedly on the left (like Glenn Greenwald) to see them as possible partners in fighting the establishment interventionist consensus. If the birpartisan middle is set on bombing, maybe a red-brown coalition of far right and far left together can turn the tide.

That’s why some anti-establishment anti-war leftists (like Glenn Greenwald) spent so much time running interference for Trump; when he repudiated the neo-cons, he seemed to have stepped out of their fondest fantasies. Trump was Charles Lindbergh returned, the great white hope of fascist isolationism, and if he wasn’t perfect in other respects—well, what’s a little racism, antisemitism, transphobia and sexual assault between coalition partners?

The problem, of course, is that Trump doesn’t have coalition partners. He just has patsies, victims, and people he hasn’t yet gotten around to defecating on. As an instinctual fascist, his only real commitments are to dominance and power, whether that means telling bald-faced lies and chortling as people believe them, or dropping bombs and murdering civilians.

This means, obviously, that you can’t trust Trump. But it also means you can’t trust people who are also fascists but who claim, for the moment, on some issues, to disagree with Trump. Marjorie Taylor Green, Tucker Carlson, and yes Glenn Greenwald too—maybe they will agree with you that, say, bombing Iran is wrong. But the thing about fascists is that even when they agree with you, they don’t agree with you, because they have no commitment to truth and no interest in finding any common ground that they cannot bury you in.

Maybe Tucker Carlson really does want to end Middle East intervention, in some sense. But when he decries the attack on Gaza or Iran, he does so not to express his sincere beliefs, and certainly not to reduce suffering in the world, but as a way to infiltrate left spaces and build his power towards his ultimate goals of personal enrichment and ethnic cleansing.

That’s the case for others on the right too, as it is for Trump. You can’t extend good faith to people who believe, as a central plank of their ideology, that good faith should always be exploited for the greater cause of bullying and hate. That’s why, if you want to end wars, the absolute first step, before you can proceed to any second, is to stop being a fascist dupe.