This post is the opinion of the the author and does not necessarily represent The Good Men Project.
On June 23, The New York Times published a list of “nearly every outright lie [Donald Trump] has told publicly since taking the oath of office.” It brought to my mind two seminary professors I had years ago, and their take on the ethics of truth telling and lying. It helps explain how Conservative Evangelicals, who exist to proclaim the Truth, can so heartily endorse a brash proclaimer of untruth.
In the early nineties, when Pat Buchanan was bringing the term “Culture War”—coined by sociologist James Davison Hunter—into public discourse, I was a student at Jerry Falwell’s Liberty Baptist Theological Seminary. In one of those classrooms, a professor declared, “All great leaders lie.”
Are all the many falsehoods spoken by Trump lies? Several days after the Times list came out, The Atlantic published Gerard Baker’s take on Trump’s untruthful ways. Baker, editor-in-chief of the Wall Street Journal, is not comfortable calling untruthful claims lies. He maintains that to know for sure a claim is a lie, “you have to be able to impute two things in the mind of the speaker: one, knowledge that it is actually untrue; and two, a deliberate intent to deceive.”
Baker has a point that we should not call all Trump’s untruths lies. After all, there are so many ways to deceive other than outright lying. A good number of Trump’s untruths are simply bullshit.
According to Harry Frankfurt’s On Bullshit, bullshit is “grounded neither in a belief that it is true nor, as a lie must be, in a belief that it is not true.” Bullshit, Frankfurt writes, is an “indifference to how things really are…” The liar has to know the truth in order to construct a passable lie. Not so the bullshitter. His falsehood is “panoramic rather than specific.” Frankfurt writes, “Bullshit is unavoidable whenever circumstances require someone to talk without knowing what he is talking about.”
Baker has a point that we should not call all Trump’s untruths lies. After all, there are so many ways to deceive other than outright lying. A good number of Trump’s untruths are simply bullshit. |
Trump does not stop at bullshitting though; he also does a fair amount of mindfucking. Colin McGinn, inspired by On Bullshit, wrote an essay titled Mindfucking. According to McGinn, mindfucking “belongs to the same family of concepts as lying and bullshitting, which is not to say that they are identical…” Mindfucking is, according to McGinn, “an inherently aggressive act…an act of psychological violence, more or less.” He writes, “The prime point here is that it involves the illegitimate exercise of power.”
We still cannot stop here in describing the falseness of Donald Trump. The man also uses gaslighting to subvert reality. The short definition of gaslighting is “a tactic in which a person or entity, in order to gain more power, makes a victim question their reality.” It is, “it is a common technique of abusers, dictators, narcissists, and cult leaders.”
When my seminary professor declared in the early 90s that all great leaders lie, he was responding to a student who had complained that he did not feel comfortable with the attendance-counting methods he had been instructed to use at Thomas Road Baptist Church. He felt it was dishonest. A discussion ensued, in which students aired other examples of apparent public lying by the school’s founder Jerry Falwell. In claiming all great leaders lie, this professor placed Falwell in the realm of the Übermensch, the overman who is not bound to the same rules as everyone else, by virtue of his being “a slave to his vision.”
When Trump came on the scene, the Religious Right was primed to receive him. They revered the authoritarian leader who, by his very nature had a divine right to lie. There is one more reason Trump, the Great Deceiver, enjoys unshaken support from Evangelicals. They already lived in a world where loyalty—not evidence—determined truth. What’s more, the value of a truth claim was better judged not by its adherence to reality but to its effectiveness in achieving a strategic objective.
While one professor was justifying Jerry Falwell’s apparent lying ways in my seminary classroom, with the Übermensch explanation, another professor down the hallway was expounding the doctrine of the ruse de guerre in Old Testament history class to justify the horrific things ancient Israel does to its enemies in the Scriptural accounts.
The ruse de guerre, the trick of war, according to the international rules of warfare, means that stratagems designed to gain the upper hand are acceptable. The admonition I had heard all my life, “The end does not justify the means,” is suspended, along with many other moral and ethical rules. “Like Stormin’ Norman,” my professor told us in class, referring to General Norman Schwarzkopf’s deployment of inflatable tanks along one border to fool Saddam Hussein during Operation Desert Storm.
In his treatise A Christian Manifesto, Frances Schaeffer posits that in the war against the enemies of God, Christians should ally themselves with those who are enemies of their enemies, become co-belligerents with those whose aims would further their own agenda. Trump is making good on that front. They appear to have Planned Parenthood on the ropes, and he has given them Neil Gorsuch, whose self-described Constitutional originalism looks very much like the Fundamentalist Christian historical-grammatical approach to the Bible.
Does Donald Trump lie? Without a doubt. Does he bullshit and mindfuck and gaslight? Yes, relentlessly. He also lives a life that flouts virtually every moral instruction Jesus gave his followers. No matter to the Religious Right. They have always been okay with alternative facts, they love an authoritarian leader who is not afraid to break the rules, and, demographic trends notwithstanding, tricks of war have made them once again feel empowered.
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Photo credit: Getty Images
And you take your facts from the Paper of Lies?
I assume you are referring to the NYT, though I cite a number of papers, both academic and nonacademic. Please though, list the many lies that the New York Times has printed to earn the title “Paper of Lies,” using Gerard Baker’s criteria and backing up each claim with clear evidence. If you will not/can not do this, you’re being a little trollish here.