Truth, Authority, and Law

No day passes without a report, news story, or gossip item broadcasting that Trump has lied again.

No one is surprised. At this point in Trump’s public frolic, we know he lies. His followers say, so what? So what, indeed? It’s not just Trump’s lies that disturb us. It’s how comfortable he is lying, how fluently, incessantly, and brazenly he lies, regardless of the circumstances. No legal, political, religious, or moral injunction daunts him. Dissenting eyewitnesses cause him no discomfort. Public censure merely titillates him. He walks away from every episode unblemished while we spectators remain behind curiously abashed. Never have we been confronted by anything like it and are hard-pressed to understand.

After listening to him, then consulting the fact checkers – unknown before Trump’s entrance onto the political stage – we are so confounded that we embroil ourselves in discussions about whether he knows he’s lying. That alone is proof of the extent to which we have been taken in, not by Trump’s lies, but by the man himself.

A diabolical advantage working in Trump’s favor is his perception, sharpened over the decades, that humans cannot handle incessant lying. While he may not understand the weakness he is exploiting, he has recognized that we fold time after time. We the victims don’t understand either. 

Because we are incapable of believing someone would constantly lie, we react in one of two ways. Rather than face the manic behavior of an indomitable liar, some of us remove the danger by capitulating, that is to say, by believing him. In doing so, we must foreswear all other sources of information because those other sources generally agree insofar as they all attempt to describe the same reality, which the liar denies. As a result, these supplicants embrace not only the man, but his world view. In cleaving to Trump, they end up making statements the rest of us consider an abdication of basic reason: Trump may have baggage, but it’s baggage his enemies made up; he is being persecuted by countless unfair legal investigations; Democrats are trying to jail him any way they can.¹ Others recite the orthodox litany: the 2020 election was stolen; voting is a joke because of the machines; the J6 riot was not an insurrection; true patriots may have to resort to violence to save the country.² Each fallacy can be traced back to Trump and Trump alone, yet no outside source can dispel these convictions from the minds of his followers. Having embraced Trump’s reality, they regard anyone who disagrees with their leader as a traitor.

Those of us who do not believe Trump commit an error of a different sort: We assume Trump attempts to be honest but, ignorant of the subject he’s talking about, makes up the parts he’s not sure of. We then occupy ourselves in assessing how far Trump has strayed from the truth this time, failing to realize that truth is irrelevant to Trump and his statements. 

Having an inveterate liar for an acquaintance would be a headache, but impact could be minimized by evasion when one’s not feeling up to it. When such a fabulist emerges as a public figure, as Trump has done, we are helpless. There’s no shutting him out. He pours nonstop over every high-voltage line into every media outlet in the world, saturating our thinking and distorting our philosophies. For his followers, he has become spliced into their brains. Rather than tire or trip him up, the unflagging exertion of bending the truth exhilarates Trump. A similar phenomenon is described in the memoirs of Alexander Solzhenitsyn and other gulag survivors: Within the harsh environment of the gulag, criminal types rose up, dominating and tormenting their fellow inmates, the majority of whom succumbed to the very inhumane conditions under which the criminals mysteriously thrived.³

What we must understand is Trump’s depravity lies not in his contempt for truth, but for authority. When asked if he ever prayed for forgiveness, he said he didn’t need to bring God into his affairs. A considerate act on the part of an inconceivably vain man? No. Trump recognizes no higher power than himself, so how could he sin? Against what? Who would there be to forgive him? He himself is the kingdom, the might, the power and – we might add – the truth and the way. 

Anyone who considers himself a supreme authority acquires the ability to speak with the force of Moses come down from Mount Sinai, a devastating advantage. So it is with Trump. His words stir primal vestiges in his followers, who crave certainty, clarity, simplicity, and power. No matter that Trump’s message is vague and unrealistic. It is unequivocal and reassuring: he will settle the war between Russia and Ukraine quickly, stop the migrant surge pouring across the border, drain the swamp. When he announces he will very easily prevent World War III, his listeners clap. When he thinks he’s got them in the palm of his hand, a lullaby lilt creeps into his voice as when he delivered this Old Testament reassurance: “I am your warrior. I am your justice. I am your retribution.”⁴ His listeners bow before him.

With no authority outside himself, Trump also has no truth to adhere to but his own. False testimony in court, denial of well-known facts, contradiction of matters of public record – what we perceive to be lies – are the tumultuous acts of a deity shaping the universe. Supreme authority that he is, Trump brings worlds into being by edict, as fundamentalists believed happened once before. Nothing Trump utters can be a lie, but instead is another stroke in creating the reality he envisions: making America great again. The vision can be realized only when Trump is reestablished as America’s boss, in full charge of its revenue and the largest personal expense account ever known. His single contingency lies in his base. To make his words true, his followers must believe. But for Trump, who can declassify documents just by thinking about it, that is no problem. He’s a man whose word is law, whose followers obey, whose words become reality, hence truth. 

P.S. Pity no one asked if, on changing his mind, Trump could reclassify those documents. While it may pose no problem for the deity, chaos might lurk for lowly subordinates.

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1. Michael C. Bender, “How College-Education Replans Learned to love Trump Again,” The New York Times, January 14, 2024. ↩︎
2. Lisa Lerer, “On the Ballot in Iowa: Fear. Anxiety. Hopelessness.” The New York Times, January 13, 2024. ↩︎
3. Elizabeth T. Klements, “Worse Than Guards: Ordinary Criminals and Political Prisoners in the GULAG (1918-1950),”University of Central Florida, 2019. ↩︎
4. On YouTube. ↩︎