Trump's ‘Dark Brilliance’ : Why He Keeps
Getting Away With Lies
Editorial
February 27, 2017 "Information
Clearing House"
- "The
Star"
- Donald Trump lies. He lies
constantly, compulsively, brazenly. He does
it even as he accuses others (usually the
“disgusting and corrupt media”) of twisting
the truth. One suspects he does it just to
keep in practice, or because he’s simply
forgotten how not to lie.
All
that is old news, though not “fake news.”
Trump has been at it so long that only the
most naïve among us retain the capacity to
be surprised by his mendacity. The question
is not whether he lies, but why. And, most
important, how he keeps on getting away with
it.
Some
clues to this mystery come from an unlikely
source, a highly respected editor and
columnist at the Wall Street Journal, a
newspaper broadly sympathetic to Trump’s
agenda as president.
Bret
Stephens, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 2013
for his commentary, is a staunch
conservative who nonetheless has opposed
Trump all along as a man morally unfit for
high office and a stranger to long-standing
conservative tenets like free trade. And
unlike most conservative pundits, he has
resisted the temptation to bend the knee to
power and hop on board the Trump train.
He
sees Trump for the charlatan he is, and as
such is a man worth listening to about what
makes the president do what he so
shamelessly does.
Stephens gave a lecture
recently in memory of Daniel Pearl,
the Journal correspondent murdered by
terrorists in Pakistan in 2002. It led him
to reflect on journalism, the nature of
truth and the method in the madness of
Donald Trump.
When
confronted by one of his blatant falsehoods,
Stephens notes, Trump often doesn’t even
attempt to back up what he said. He’ll
simply reply that “many people say I’m
right,” transforming the argument into a
test of personal credibility and effectively
denying the validity of what is usually
known as “facts.”
“It’s
important not to dismiss the president’s
reply simply as dumb,” says Stephens. “We
ought to assume that it’s darkly brilliant –
if not in intention then certainly in
effect. The president is responding to a
claim of fact not by denying the fact, but
by denying the claim that facts are supposed
to have on an argument.
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“He
isn’t telling (his opponent) that he’s got
his facts wrong. He’s saying that as far as
he is concerned facts, as most people
understand the term, don’t matter. That they
are indistinguishable from, and
interchangeable with, opinion, and that
statements of fact needn’t have any purchase
against a man who is either sufficiently
powerful to ignore them or sufficiently
shameless to deny them – or, in his case,
both.”
The
bottom line: “There you have the Trumpian
view of the world. If I had to sum it up in
a single sentence, it would be this: Truth
is what you can get away with.”
This is the motto of both tyrants and
showmen through the ages. Eventually,
though, they get caught out, at least most
of them. Why is Trump seemingly immune from
the normal rules? How does he keep
getting away with it?
Stephens offers a few reasons. First is the
sheer volume of his lies: “If a public
figure tells a whopping lie once in his
life, it’ll haunt him into his grave. If he
lies morning, noon and night, it will become
almost impossible to remember any one
particular lie. Outrage will fall victim to
its own ubiquity.
“It’s
the same truth contained in Stalin’s famous
remark that the death of one man is a
tragedy, but the death of a million is a
statistic.”
Second
is Trump’s sheer entertainment value. The
fact that he’s liable to say anything at any
moment turns us into gawking spectators: “We
have been given tickets to a spectacle, in
which all you want to do is watch.”
Then
there are changing standards of judgment, in
which politics becomes a matter of
perception rather than actual performance.
If people out in the heartland see Trump as
successful, then that very fact makes him
more successful.
Finally, there’s the powerful temptation
among some people to rationalize the
behaviour of the man in the White House,
however bizarre. Conservatives rush to
praise a man who disdains the globalist
world-view they have preached for decades;
moralists embrace a man who has turned his
personal life into a tabloid saga.
Some
of this is pure hypocrisy or simple power
worship. But it’s also linked to a powerful
desire to be on the right side of what seems
to be a historical force, propelled by
genuine (though misguided) sentiments among
the people. It’s the impulse to make sense
of Trump’s nonsense, to discover rationality
amid the irrational.
The
challenge is to resist these temptations, to
insist on the integrity of facts in the face
of a politics that simply denies their
relevance. In Stephens’ words, “to believe
in an epistemology that can distinguish
between truth and falsity, facts and
opinion, evidence and wishes.”
It’s
appalling that such elementary principles
must be re-stated in 2017. But in the age of
Trump, it’s more important than ever.
