Meet “truthful hyperbole”
Is it lying or is it just colorful “hyperbole”?
A couple of days ago
Letitia James filed a 220-page lawsuit in New York State Supreme Court accusing Donald Trump and three of his children of using wildly inaccurate evaluations of Trump Tower, Mar-a-Lago and multiple other properties to defraud lenders and cheat on taxes. The result, she said, was a “staggering” and “astounding” scheme that yielded an estimated $250 million in ill-gotten gains.
James termed these financial manipulations “the art of the steal,” a play on the title of Trump’s 1987 bestselling memoir The Art of the Deal. In that book, Trump (or, more likely, his co-author, journalist Tony Schwartz) called his aggressive salesmanship “truthful hyperbole,” which was explained as “an innocent form of exaggeration — and a very effective form of promotion.”
Stop right there. There is no such thing as “truthful hyperbole.” It may sound cute, if you’re not paying attention, but it’s a contradiction in terms, and is itself dishonest.
And when it comes to marketing there is definitely no such thing as “an innocent form of exaggeration.” We know it’s not “innocent” because it’s done to trick people into giving you more money. You don’t get to call that “innocent.”
That of course is all the more true when we’re talking about Trump, who is the least “innocent” person most of us have ever seen.
The reason, Trump (or Schwartz) said, was that “people want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular,” and Trump was more than willing to oblige them.
That is, he was eager to “oblige them” by telling them his product was the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular so that they would give him more money than it was worth. That’s not obliging them, it’s tricking them into giving him money.
It’s maddening that Trump basically informed the world that he was tricking people into paying him more for his properties than they were worth and the world just chuckled and left him to get on with it.
Sorry, I have to be that guy again. Your basic point is correct, but I think you’ve made a slight overstatement:
There is a legal concept known as “puffery” that more or less translates to “innocent form of exaggeration.” Essentially, it’s stuff that reasonable consumers wouldn’t consider to be factual assertions: things like “world’s best,” “greatest,” “amazing,” etc. (Recall the scene in the film “Elf” where the titular character runs into a diner to effusively congratulate them for having — as declared on their sign — the “World’s Best Coffee.” The joke works because Will Ferrell’s character is so naive that he takes literally a claim that every reasonable consumer knows is just, well, puffery.)
Here’s how a former FTC Commissioner described (I couldn’t find an “official” definition on the FTC site itself in a quick search):
Anyway, as that quote shows, claims that include specific factual statements — like the fair market value of a piece of real estate, which is the key allegation here — go beyond puffery and can be fraudulent. This article on a law firm’s website (no, not mine!) is a pretty decent overview if you want more.
So if the NY AG can prove what she’s alleging, I don’t see a puffery defense here. But there is such a thing as innocent exaggeration — it’s just that what the Trumps were doing goes well beyond that.
Interesting. I wasn’t really making a legal claim, but rather a language claim. Perhaps a language/morality claim. Anyway don’t be sorry to be that guy because the information is interesting.
Screechy, I love you being that guy because I always learn something.
Long ago, I read a book on advertising. It explained that in the world of advertising, “best” means good, and “better” means best.
The reasoning is that if you have a bunch of vendors supplying a product, and all the vendors’ products perform to some accepted standard, then each vendor is entitled to claim that their product is the best, in the sense that there is no better. This is the best toaster: it toasts bread (what more did you want?)
OTOH, if you say that your product is better, then your product really does have to be superior to the competition in some way in order to substantiate that claim.
All toasters are best, all shall have prizes.
All sorts of advertising slogans from my childhood fell foul of accuracy laws.
The one which changed the most (long past the point, in my opinion, that it should have simply been abandoned) was Whiskas cat food. “Eight out of ten cats prefer Whiskas!” became, eventually “In tests, eight out of ten owners who expressed a preference said that their cats preferred Whiskas!” Not exactly snappy, eh?
EU laws are very protective of consumers. Subway have fallen foul of them quite recently, when they lost their case to continue to call their rolls ‘bread’. They contain too much sugar – they are officially cake.
I wonder if they’ll ever come down on European estate agents, landlords, and the like, for the exaggerations and blatant lies they tell.
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“Of course, honesty is one of the better policies.”
— Charles Saxon in The New Yorker, May 25, 1981