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Donald Trump lies on every day ending with day. Yesterday, he chose to lie about his actions on 9/11 while addressing a gathering of first responders. He claimed he had gone himself with a crew of workers to try to assist on the day of the attack, and that two firemen who thought he was in danger because of a rickety building picked him up and ran with him to safety.
There is no corroboration from witnesses or public records. It sounds like nonsense, and it is nonsense.
Inevitably, Trump’s remarks have led many to reiterate accusations that he is in mental decline due to his advanced age. At 80, the argument goes, he can no longer tell lies from truth. He is senile and therefore makes self-aggrandizing claims, conflating what he wants to have happened with what is true.
Trump does constantly mistake his own inner heroic monologue with truth. But this is not a new phenomenon for him. Mental decline did not create Trump’s moral failures. Rather, his moral failures have destroyed his cognitive capacity. He is a fool because he is evil, not the other way around.
9/11 claims
Trump’s claims about his role in 9/11 are an especially good test case. That’s because he has been lying about his role in 9/11 from the moment it happened 25 years ago.
Trump was 55 years old when the towers came down; he was not senile, and no one really believes he was in cognitive decline at that point. Nonetheless, when he was interviewed on the day itself, he rushed to do what he does best, which is tell disgusting self-aggrandizing lies. In a telephone interview just after the attack, Trump boasted that his property at 40 Wall Street was the tallest building still standing in Manhattan. That was a lie; it was the second tallest. And it was an incredibly fucked up thing to say while the bodies were still being counted.
Two days after 9/11, Trump uttered the first version of his lie about being involved in clean-up efforts. He told a German reporter that “I have a lot of men down here right now…over 100 and we have about 125 coming.”
Nor was that Trump’s last falsehood. In 2015, when he was 69 years old and running for President, he claimed that he saw “thousands and thousands” of Muslims cheering the fall of the World Trade Center in New Jersey on television. He did not; it never happened. It was just a racist lie.
And in 2016, Trump lied again about being involved in clean up efforts on 9/11, insisting he had “helped clear the rubble.”
Trump, has, then, told multiple lies about 9/11 over 25 years, starting when he was 55, continuing when he was 70, and now, at 80, elaborating further. That doesn’t suggest someone who is in cognitive decline and has suddenly started having trouble telling truth from lies. It suggests someone who has lied consistently, remorselessly, gleefully, for decades.
Trump believes what he wants
Does Trump believe his own lies? Does he really think that his 2017 inauguration crowd was massive when you can look up video and see it was not? Does he believe he did not sexually assault E. Jean Carroll, even though a jury held him liable for doing just that? Does he actually think he was at Ground Zero and saved by burly and deferential firemen? Or what?
Trump’s relationship to his own statements is I think best described by Harry G.
Frankfurt’s philosophical term “bullshit.” People who lie, Frankfurt argues, are intentionally trying to deceive; they know that the truth does not benefit them, and so they attempt to mislead others about what the truth is. Bullshit, in contrast, is a statement made by someone who has no interest in whether the statement is true or false. Trump bullshits; he says whatever he feels will benefit him, without examining, or caring, whether the statement is true.
You would think that Trump would know, somewhere, in some part of his psyche, that his crowd size is small, that he raped a woman, that firemen did not whisk him from danger. But as a committed, fervent, religious devotee of bullshit, Trump refuses to believe in an objective world in which facts, or people, exist outside his skull. It isn’t that Trump can’t tell truth from lies. It is that he has made a deliberate choice to only believe, and only know, what he wants to. Truth and falsehood are irrelevant categories; all that exists is what benefits the greatest and onliest man on earth, Donald Trump.
Trump is so great, and so important, that the truth should bend around him. He is entitled to his own bullshit. If people insist on pointing out the bullshit, he becomes enraged and aggrieved. His minions are well aware of this reaction and have adopted it as their own—which is why White House Spokesman David Ingle spouted faux outrage when questioned about why his boss was telling transparent lies again. “The fact that the failing legacy media is using this to try to attack him is a disgrace and yet another reason why Americans’ trust in the media is at an all-time low,” he burbled. (If you want to see an all-time low, you can look at Trump’s approval numbers.)
Ignorance is a choice
Trump doesn’t just refuse to know where he was on 9/11. He refuses to learn how tariffs work, insisting on treating them like magic dominance beans that force other countries to pay you. He refuses to understand how windmills work. He refuses to recognize that Venezuelan oil won’t fix his disastrous Iran war, which he refuses to acknowledge he has lost. He won’t read intelligence briefings because he would rather have his “human binky” Natalie Harp run alongside him and print out positive right wing bubble coverage of his awesomeness.
As president, Trump is at the center of the greatest information network ever developed on earth. He could speak to experts on every and any topic; he could learn about tariffs, or windmills, or Venezuelan oil, or the Strait of Hormuz if he wanted. He doesn’t learn about these things because he does not want to, just as he did not want to know that his was not the tallest building in Manhattan, or just as he did not want to know that no one in New Jersey was cheering the 9/11 attacks.
People do get more like themselves when they get older. But I think it’s important to recognize that Trump has always been this asshole snorting his own bullshit, high on his own entitlement and motivated reasoning. He is not an intellectual vacuum because his brain is decaying. He is an intellectual vacuum because he long ago made the moral choice to know only that Trump is great and right, and to know absolutely nothing else ever.
There’s an impulse to medicalize Trump’s lies, because a diagnosis of cognitive decline seems objective and, I think, because a diagnosis of cognitive decline feels stigmatizing, and therefore powerful. But the truth is that most mentally ill people do not turn into gravity wells of bigotry and ignorance. Trump’s mental failures are the result of the studied moral choice for bullshit that he made as a young man, and has kept choosing, over and over, year in and year out, no matter the circumstance, no matter the stakes. He is a moral monstrosity, and that monstrous morality has eaten his brain. Thanks to the moral failures of his country, it may eat the rest of us as well.
I'll be 74 in a few weeks. I remember exactly where I was and what I was doing when the Twin Towers fell. It's like having a film loop in my brain. I can't unsee it. Trump lies in the same way that the rest of us breathe - automatically and without conscious thought.
thanks for this. helps me maintain sanity. your last sentence hits hard… that enough of us were moral or at least cognitive failures to elect him democratically, and that so much of society is catering to him if not complicit fascists is despairing. (the nyt referred to others 'disputing' his 911 accounts, leaving the impression that "opinions vary." i know that most people are decent enough, but what are we even doing here?