America Is Finally Starting to See Trump for the Bullsh*t Artist He Is
Every once in a while, an old high school friend of mine who is MAGA posts something like the following on Facebook: “Hey libtards, you keep saying Donald Trump is stupid, but if he’s so stupid, how come he was elected president twice, overcoming your incessant corrupt attempts to steal the 2016 and 2024 elections, and escaping your nefarious deep state plans to put him in office behind bars? It’s supposed to be a kind of bruising reprimand that leaves people like me stammering.
The answer to Trump’s success is very simple: he lies all the time, and lying works. Of course, there are other factors at play – he has exploited and intensified a certain strain of deep proletarian resentment towards liberal elites, and… well, that’s it. But above all, it’s the lies.
Before I delve further into this topic, let me define the word “lie” as I understand it here, because lies can take many different forms. Trump’s standard lie is a simple general statement that the non-fact is a fact. He does this several times a day. A notable, if all too common, example came last Saturday morning, when he “truthed” (oh the levels of irony!) that he had “JUST GOT THE HIGHEST POLLLING NUMBERS OF MY ‘POLITICAL CAREER’.” black is white, the classics.
We tell ourselves that we live in a free society with a Fourth Estate that denounces lies and holds liars accountable. Additionally, we teach our children not to lie and warn them of the consequences if they do. In such a society, lying should not work. So why?
This works in the public arena (private life is another matter) because in this sphere, the one who lies all the time creates reality, or should I say “reality”. Think about it. Suppose four guys are sitting at a bar arguing about sports, such as the upcoming college football playoffs. They start by agreeing that Ohio State is the favorite because it’s currently ranked number one in the polls, which is actually the case.
But one of them says: No, Texas A&M is number one. The other three look at him like he’s crazy. They take their phone, tap, tap, tap, and they show him the leaderboard. But he still insists. These polls are false. It’s Texas A&M. Everyone says it.
The conversation stops. The liar “won” the argument. Not in the sense that he is factually right; he is not. But he won in two senses. First, it ended what could have been a rational, interesting and lively debate based on common factual premises. Second, he forced the other three to waste time and mental energy debating a proposition that isn’t even up for debate, and in doing so, he managed to place himself at the center of the attention and controversy that everyone is talking about.
Well, you say, the other three could just ignore it, and in my example, it’s possible that they could. But now imagine that these four people and their opinions are highly valued by the other 100 patrons in the bar: that they lead the conversation and that the others listen to them and follow their lead. And further imagine that over the years our Texas A&M sidekick has earned the intense loyalty of 40 or 45 of the other customers, so much so that they, too, take the position that the Aggies are in fact number one. Now the entire bar is embroiled in a stupid and unnecessary controversy.
And finally, imagine one more thing. Imagine if our A&M fan and his supporters weren’t just telling Buckeye fans they were wrong. No! They accuse them of moral turpitude. They claim that believing that Ohio State is number one is a sign of confusion, weakness, depravity; non-Americanism, even. They do it with singular conviction and vigor, enough that the 10 or 15 bar patrons who don’t follow college football at all and don’t know who number one really is come away genuinely confused and perhaps even inclined to believe them.
This is how lying in the public sphere succeeds. And, I repeat, Trump tells many such lies every day. He speaks to the press two or three times a day almost every day, which is probably what, 45 minutes, an hour? Spitting a lie every two minutes, which may well be low, that’s about 25 factual lies per day. (This is commonly called a “gish gallop” – a torrent of lies that comes so hot and heavy that the truth finds no grip.)
Who can follow? Nobody can. I complain a lot about the mainstream media, and for good reason: they spent years repeating Trump’s incessant lies in the interest of “fairness” (and they still do it too much). But this is an aspect of their task that even I find almost impossible. A media outlet would need a staff of at least, oh, 15 people to really keep careful track of all these lies. Nobody can do that these days.
Furthermore, it is human nature, when faced with a flood of lies, to give up at some point. Fly the white flag. If someone tells you that the sky is green and the grass is blue, you will start by arguing with them. Then you will take him outside to show him. But if he continues to insist, you will give up.
This, and nothing else, is the secret of Trump’s success. He wins by exhausting honest people. After 10,000, 20,000 or 50,000 such lies, Trump has wildly distorted “reality” in his favor. And, more importantly, he has an entire political party and multi-million dollar propaganda media that repeats and reinforces his lies. He and they have convinced about 40 percent of the country that Ohio State is not number one, metaphorically, and that you have to be a communist to think that. And they’ve planted enough doubt in the minds of about 10 percent of the country that they don’t know what to think.
But here’s the good news: I feel like that’s finally changing.
I wrote above that Trump has an entire political party behind him. Well, not quite, now it’s minus one. I’m not going to praise Marjorie Taylor Greene here, but I will give her this: whatever her motivations, she stood up to the guy. Ditto Tom Massie. Their actions communicate to the MAGA base, in a way no Democrat could, that Trump is lying about Jeffrey Epstein. a few way, shape or form. The seed is thus planted in the collective MAGA mind that Trump might be full of beans at times.
There are other encouraging signs that lies may no longer work. The more Trump continues to brag about the greatest economy in the history of the Spirit of God, the more people will view him as a crook. How anyone was stupid enough to believe last year that they could lower prices is another question, but at the moment he can’t convince most people that they’re not seeing what they see when they go to the supermarket.
America could also begin to see the all-too-real consequences of its foreign policy lies this week. Trump has given Volodymyr Zelenskiy until Thursday to agree to the 28-point “peace” plan he and his people worked out with the Kremlin that gives Ukraine almost nothing. If Zelenskiy hasn’t agreed by Thanksgiving, Trump says, he’ll be on his own. This is a morally repugnant position for a president of the United States to take, and while I’m not naive enough to expect most Americans to care passionately about Ukraine, they will understand the fact that Trump spent two years repeatedly lying about how easy it would be to broker peace in this conflict.
Reality is finally starting to catch up with Trump. And so, to answer the MAGA crowd’s Facebook question more fully: he only seems smart because his lies overwhelmed a political culture that didn’t know how to respond to them. If I were a Trump fan, I would start worrying about what will happen when this stops.
