Trump won the nomination as the candidate who lied the most, won the presidency as someone known to lie; has an unshakable base despite ongoing lies. Underlying social issues made this possible. His base is concerned about their place in the world, not about economic hardship. Rather it is about dominant groups that felt threatened by change, and a candidate who took advantage of that trend. Faced with the fact that non-white groups would soon outnumber them revved up their support for Trump, their desire for anti-immigrant policies, and opposition to political correctness. Trump’s America First policy supposedly supports key initiatives that works for all citizens in the country and put America first. Trump is a narcissist, and narcissists are liars. Narcissism is a disorder of the self – a self based on opportunism instead of values. For them life is a game and they play to win, and the lie becomes necessary for their own survival.
Historical perspective is always a useful thing and if history tells us anything about lying it tells us that people have always thought there was too much of it and however much of it there was, there was always more of it now than there had ever been before. The 12th century English courtier and future Bishop of Chartres, John of Salisbury, feared no time had ever been so dangerous for men of honest virtue. According to John, the royal and ecclesiastical courts of Europe teemed with every sort of deceiver and falsifier, with timeservers and wheedlers, gift-givers, actors, mimics, procurers and gossipmongers. The only thing that surpassed their variety was their number “for the foul inundation of their cancerous disease seeps into all so that there is rarely anyone left uncontaminated”. But this is not exactly the case. John of Salisbury thought there was nothing for it but for the virtuous man to lie to accomplish the good and to protect himself from the evil schemers that everywhere surround him.
Pierre Charron (1541-1603), the French skeptic, claimed humanity’s essential qualities were vanity, weakness, inconstancy, and presumption. Writing late in the 16th century, Pierre Charron asked his readers to “observe how all mankind are made up of falsehood and deceit, of tricks and lies, how unfaithful and dangerous, how full of disguise and design all conversation is at present become, but especially, how much more it abounds near [the prince], and how manifestly hypocrisy and dissimulation are the reigning qualities of princes’ courts.” Until the French Revolution, the problem of lying and hypocrisy often seemed to be experienced most keenly in the courts of the European elite, those hybrid spaces, both public and private, political and domestic, in which eager courtiers and all manner of hangers-on sought their fortunes. A zero-sum game, fortune hunting required the self-serving courtier to deceive and slander his competitors, to fawn over and flatter his superiors.1
But first, we need to identify why current mechanisms of preventing political deception don’t work well. The traditional mechanisms for identifying the truth about politics come from mainstream media and its fact checking. At the same time increasing numbers of people are using social media to get news – 62 percent, according to studies. Unfortunately, a study by Stanford University shows that most social media news consumers cannot differentiate real from fake news stories. The situation is so bad that, according to research, in the three months before the 2016 presidential election the top 20 false news stories had more Facebook shares, reactions and comments than did the top 20 true news articles. To add insult to injury, the Fox News group has become Donald Trump’s state news agency. In the long run, this tendency leads to high political polarization and the deterioration of trust in the political system.2
The concept of marketing has historically always been about convincing the public to be attracted to a product or service. Google took advantage of their power of information to distill the very essence of their search engines into individual filter bubbles. There is a dollar value associated with the data that they could sell so that a company could send that same marketing message to the exact individuals that had already expressed interest. The manipulation problem of filter bubbles is obvious. While many people don’t want to be told that they are not only being molded and managed, but they are doing so willingly. We live in a fast-paced, short-attention-span society that encourages the path of least resistance, and filter bubbles allow us to cut to the chase more quickly. The fact that we don’t see alternative concepts, viewpoints, or even services and products is of lesser value; and this is where the fine line arises between being controlled and controlling.
Every time you do a search on Google, it tailors your results based on your previous search history. Your search results will look different if you use Google on Campus as opposed to using in a café across town. Google is making certain assumptions about you based on your IP address. This creates the situation or danger of being so trapped inside your filter bubble that you never see the other side of the story. In order to be informed we need to know what each side is saying about an issue, and not fall for confirmation bias (reading only sources that already fall in line with our current views). There are attempts to address this challenge with online resources. One resource is Allsides which provides multiple sides on the same story so that you can get the full picture. Another source is ProCon.org presenting controversial issues in a straight forward non-partisan way.
Valery Legasov, the chief of the commission investigating the Chernobyl disaster, observes: “What is the cost of lies? It’s not that we’ll mistake them for the truth. The real danger is that if we hear enough lies, then we no longer recognize the truth at all.” Basically, the more you lie, the easier it is to do it, and the bigger the lies get. Donald Trump merely replaced one swamp with another. He and his henchmen sabotage democracy by creating their own swamp where one cannot tell truth from fiction, where rational debate evaporates as he diverts, distracts, and deflects accountability. Trump has attacked some branches of law enforcement, especially those pursuing white-collar malfeasance, as his allies and former campaign officials are ensnared in various investigations. Trump surrogates were publicly advancing unsubstantiated allegations about the former vice president and Ukraine around the same time as Trump’s conversation with the Ukrainian president.
Evangelicals in America are not simply a religious group; they are a political group inexorably linked to the Republican Party. Evangelicals made a deal with the devil when they supported Trump. They promised to support Trump for president, even though they knew he is not a good person, in exchange for being dealt back into the political power game of determining the moral direction the country is headed The Christian right remains focused on the Supreme Court, which many evangelicals see as the chief impediment to their agenda on issues ranging from school prayer to LGBTQ rights to abortion. Their political playbook requires evangelicals to elect an attentive president who, in turn, will appoint socially conservative federal judges. Once these judges are in place, evangelicals believe they will be better positioned to win the battles over these key issues. Impeachment entrenches evangelical support for Trump.
“Liars have a dilemma,” says Ray Bull, PhD, a professor of criminal investigation at the University of Derby, in the United Kingdom. “They have to make up a story to account for the time of wrongdoing, but they can’t be sure what evidence the interviewer has against them.” So, the president’s problem isn’t just that the Ukraine affair has potentially provided the House with the substance of an impeachable offense. It’s the fact that the very same alleged activity – Trump was using the power of the presidency for his personal political benefit – cuts against his core political message of always placing “America first.” As more facts come out, as predicted, Trump’s Ukraine narrative changes – he lies to protect himself. Trump’s fears of consequences, as the whistle blower’s accusations create a concrete legal process, as well as a rising threat of impeachment, drives his decision to withhold cooperation.
Medieval writers like John and Christine de Pizan argued that we must sometimes lie to protect ourselves, to protect the state. Rather than worry about the fact that everyone lies, we should concern ourselves with the reasons why we lie. A narcissist like Trump is operating from a place of defense all the time. The lie is more of a PR stunt, a marketing ploy rather than a cohesive integrated set of values. The narcissistic personality is more of a store front designed to hide that there isn’t any there, there.3 When Trump is facing a potentially very bad news cycle his move is to: distract, divert, repeat – to move the problem out of the public eye. Testimony from a series of career bureaucrats continue to expose the secrets and lies about the Ukraine scandal, and Trump’s account will easily cave in on itself under the weight of truth.
1 Dallas G Denery II (28 Jan 2015) The true history of lying https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/the-true-history-of-lying-1.2081531
2 Gleb Tsipursky. (15 June 2017) How to Address the Epidemic of Lies in Politics https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/how-to-address-the-epidemic-of-lies-in-politics/
3 Katherine Fabrizio. (18 Aug 2019) Why a Narcissist Lies and What it Says About Them https://blogs.psychcentral.com