The Times on Trump’s insistent lying
The Times editorial board has a think piece on what to do about Trump’s relentless lying. They use that word a lot. As I mentioned a week or two ago, newspapers don’t do that lightly – they don’t do it at all unless they’re very sure they can back it up. This piece treats Trump’s lying as not even in doubt.
Mind you, they start with an odd claim.
Donald Trump understood at least one thing better than almost everybody watching the 2016 election: The breakdown of a shared public reality built upon widely accepted facts represented not a hazard, but an opportunity.
The institutions that once generated and reaffirmed that shared reality — including the church, the government, the news media, the universities and labor unions — are in various stages of turmoil or even collapse.
Including the church? First of all, what church? There is no singular “the church” here. But much more to the point, what do churches and other religious institutions have to do with a shared public reality built upon widely accepted facts? Nothing. Churches & co are about myths, or stories, or fictions, or lies. They’re also about rituals and community and the like, but they rest on a shared story.
But that’s a side issue.
The rise of social media has been great in many ways. In a media environment with endless inputs and outlets, citizens can inform and entertain one another, organize more easily and hold their leaders accountable. But it also turns out that when everyone can customize his or her own information bubble, it’s easier for demagogues to deploy made-up facts to suit the story they want to tell.
That’s what Mr. Trump has done. For him, facts aren’t the point; trust is. Like any autocrat, he wins his followers’ trust — let’s call it a blind trust — by lying so often and so brazenly that millions of people give up on trying to distinguish truth from falsehood. Whether the lie is about millions of noncitizens voting illegally, or the crime rate, or President Obama’s citizenship, it doesn’t matter: In a confusing world of competing, shouted “truths,” the simplest solution is to trust in your leader. As Mr. Trump is fond of saying, “I alone can fix it.”
If the solution is trust…then why trust a nasty bully like Trump? It’s not as if he’s good at putting on a convincing performance of trustworthiness. He performs anger and belligerence. That’s what seems to draw people, not trust.
He is not just indifferent to facts; he can be hostile to any effort to assert them. On Tuesday, Chuck Jones, a union boss at Carrier Corporation, toldThe Washington Post that Mr. Trump was wrong when he claimed to have saved 1,100 of the company’s jobs from moving to Mexico — the real number will be closer to 730. Rather than admit error, the president-elect instead attacked Mr. Jones, a private citizen, on Twitter, saying he had done a “terrible job representing workers.”
In other words, Mr. Trump’s is a different kind of lying, though it has been coming for some time.
Sure; it’s a different kind of lying because he’s a different kind of guy. He’s exceptional in so many ways – ignorance, pugnacity, rudeness, cruelty, corruption, greed – it’s no surprise that he’s exceptionally dishonest and proud of it, too.
The Carrier thing bugs me for a different reason: Trump didn’t do anything. Trump didn’t save 1,100 jobs. Or 730 jobs. Governor Pence saved the jobs, however many jobs it was. Yes, I understand that he did it at Trump’s behest, but Trump has no authority (yet) to broker trade deals or hand out tax breaks. And then, of course, there’s the apparently unimportant detail that the Carrier deal employed exactly those things Trump said on the campaign trail were ineffective.
The problem is, he may not be that exceptional. The thing I notice about Trump is how much he sounds like a lot of the other people that surround me. This isn’t something most news media or political analysts are going to pick up on, because they never enter the bubble in the middle of the country where many people think like Trump, shout like Trump, and lie like Trump…and think themselves superior to the “reality-based community”. These are people who think someone is taking their rights away when they suggest that calling other people names based on a general characteristic they themselves don’t share (race, creed, sex, sexual orientation, etc) is not nice.
These are people who insist on placing their state name before the word “nice” and insisting that this is a true characteristic of the people in their area. Things like “Minnesota nice” (see PZ for his take) or “Nebraska nice” are part of the lexicon, but these people are not necessarily nice. They are polite to strangers who come through their town (as long as they look “right”), but they are shouty bigots who insist that other people do not share the same rights they enjoy.
I know. I grew up here. I live here. I have family members that are Trump (without the money – and if you haven’t experienced a Trump without money, you have lived). I see this same attitude every single day that I live here – 40years plus and counting – and I expect to see it every day that I continue living here. These are the people that talk about “values” as if they are some sort of concrete thing that they have and others lack. These are the people who proudly carry semi-automatic weapons to Wal-Mart, and fly the Confederate flag on the back of their monster truck, even though they live in a state that came into the union slavery-free, and were part of the Union, not the Confederacy. They wear their racism and sexism proudly, like a bigoted t-shirt, and their bumpers are loaded with in-your-face hostility to all things progressive, and most things humane.
I can’t imagine Trump “understanding” anything. I don’t think he’s perceptive or clever or calculating. Those are qualities and abilities that require more thoughtfulness and introspection than he is capable of. He’s too easily bored, too easily goaded, too impulsive and too easily flattered and impressed to be much of a plotter or strategist. There are now probably plenty of people around him who will do all the hatchet jobs and dirty work for him or in his name. I can imagine a nightmare of infighting, bickering and backbiting to either win his favour or manipulate him. He seems to be immanently manipulable and too stupid and arrogant to realize it.I’m thinking “I, Claudius” with suits and cellphones.
It seems like the best we can hope is that Trump pisses off the republicans in office that matter as soon as possible. It seems likely: he’ll turn on them immediately if they have slightly different agenda, won’t he?