The philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote in a 1967 essay Truth and Politics, “No one has ever doubted that truth and politics are on rather bad terms with each other, and no one, as far as I know, has ever counted truthfulness among the political virtues.”
It is a fascinating essay and worth the read, written in the midst of the tumultuous 1960s and the lies and half-truths the government used to prosecute the Vietnam War. I came across it while ruminating on our current President and his loose affiliation with truth.
I’m well aware that all (and in the brief research I’ve done, it does seem true), all presidents lie.
More often the lies had to do with national security, or state secrets, or an over-riding state interest in protecting the public from some dark truth, but often enough the lies were just politics and trying to stay in power.
In a Jan/Feb 2007 Atlantic magazine article, Carl Cannon wrote, “That same year, (1943) at a conference in Tehran in which the Allies discussed opening new fronts against Nazi Germany, Churchill stressed the need to keep the Allies’ plans secret. To Joseph Stalin, he said, “In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.” Churchill’s line is par for the course in wartime, when you have to keep your secrets to yourself,” Sean Wilentz, a professor of history at Princeton, told me this summer when we discussed the morality, and the utility, of shading the truth in the White House. “Presidents lie for all kinds of reasons,” he added. “Richard Nixon lied because he was trying to save his presidency, which was imperiled by his misdeeds. Franklin Delano Roosevelt misled the country over things like Lend-Lease in order to advance a policy he thought would save the world, but which he knew would be difficult to sell politically. Honesty doesn’t necessarily make for an effective presidency … What the public has to judge is whether [presidents] are lying for the good of the country—or for their own good.”
Franklin Roosevelt lied about his health, as did John Kennedy.
I understand that kind of lying, and I even understand the usual lying in politics for politics’ sake. I don’t agree with it, but then I’m not running for office.
But this president has taken lying to new heights, even for a politician. And that bothers me, and I do think that should bother all of us in this America.
Politicians can misstate, forget, spin, and even change their minds on policy, and I can live with that. I can explain it to my grandchildren.
But what is going on now has no precedent and disturbs me at a different level.
Trump speaks the doublespeak of Orwell’s novel 1984 where the Ministry of Truth is concerned with lies, the Ministry of Love with torture, and the Ministry of Peace with war. On Aug. 19, Trump attorney Rudolph W. Giuliani declared: “Truth isn’t truth.” Kellyanne Conway coined the term “alternative facts.”
There is no truth but his truth; all else is Fake News.
And it’s no accident.
In an interview in July of 2016, Trump told television reporter Lesley Stahl that he attacks the press to "demean" and "discredit" reporters so that the public won't believe "negative stories" about him.
"At one point, he started to attack the press," Stahl told the audience at a journalism awards event at the Harvard Club in Manhattan on Monday evening. "There were no cameras in there."
"I said, 'You know, this is getting tired. Why are you doing it over and over? It's boring and it's time to end that. You know, you've won ... why do you keep hammering at this?'" Stahl went on. "And Trump said: 'You know why I do it? I do it to discredit you all and demean you all so that when you write negative stories about me no one will believe you.'"
And it works for him.
The press has always been a brake on government excess and grandstanding, and when doing its job well it sheds light on what is true even when the government wants it shaded with misinformation.
But Trump understands his audience as the reality TV host he is; he repeats his lies often and loudly, and has the bully-pulpit to do it.
He seems averse to the truth, and Hannah Arendt’s 1967 essay sheds some light on why; “Seen from the viewpoint of politics, truth has a despotic character. It is therefore hated by tyrants, who rightly fear the competition of a coercive force they cannot monopolize, and it enjoys a rather precarious status in the eyes of governments that rest on consent and abhor coercion….Unwelcome opinion can be argued with, rejected, or compromised upon, but unwelcome facts possess an infuriating stubbornness that nothing can move except plain lies.”
And Trump is good with lies.
All good news agencies employ fact checkers to verify reporter’s stories, both to perform their unwritten dictate as the fourth branch of government and also to shield themselves from liability. The Washington Post fact checker Glenn Kessler is used to lying in politics, and it’s part of his job to verify what goes into the Post. But the flood of lies coming from Trump spurred him to keep track, and by the 601stday of this presidency, Kessler had counted 5,000 lies.
And data indicates that the rate of lying on a daily basis has been increasing as Trump settles into his job and eliminates those in his administration that challenge him.
“In his first year as President, Trump made 2,140 false claims, according to the Post. In just the last six months, he has nearly doubled that total to 4,229,” wrote Susan Glasser in an Aug. 3 New Yorkerarticle, and “On July 5th, the Post found what appears to be Trump’s most untruthful day yet: seventy-six per cent of the ninety-eight factual assertions he made in a campaign-style rally in Great Falls, Montana, were “false, misleading or unsupported by evidence.”
As Arendt wrote, “Unwelcome facts possess an infuriating stubbornness that nothing can move except plain lies” and facts are a problem for Trump because they don’t match the landscape of his own truth. So he makes up his own truth.
Now that’s not a problem in general, we all do it.
But the more one person accepts responsibility, especially responsibility for other people, truth matters. It does to me.
It mattered with my kids, and still does. It matters with my grandkids.
I don’t remember ever catching my dad in a lie, nor my mother. We went through the Santa Claus bit, and the Easter Bunny, and I early on understood that for what it was. I sorted out the difference between truth and belief, which was more difficult, but still understandable. My parents inculcated in me a respect for telling the truth, and I think it's reflected in my five siblings as well, and in our children and grandchildren.
So much of what Trump lies about is childish; inconsequential, yet he seems incapable of telling the truth. What does it really matter how many people were at his inauguration?
Those are concerns of someone who is very unsure of himself, who knows that his own mental image of who he is, and the reality of who he is, are severely at odds. Those are the concerns of someone who would be a good “reality” show host, because that’s not about reality at all, so the host can bend the “truth” anyway he wants.
Hannah Arendt again, “It has frequently been noticed that the surest long-term result of brainwashing is a peculiar kind of cynicism – an absolute refusal to believe in the truth of anything, no matter how well this truth may be established. In other words, the result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lies will now be accepted as truth, and the truth be defamed as lies, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world – and the category of truth vs. falsehood is among the mental means to this end – is being destroyed.
And for this trouble there is no remedy.”
In an ABC interview Trump said it’s OK for him to lie because “people agree with me.” That reminds me in a way of the Santa Claus tale most parents tell their kids; but in the case of the President of the United States, that’s not OK with me. We’re not his children, he’s not my parent, and his motives are far from clear. It’s the voice of an elitist who deigns to parcel out truth only as it pleases him and only in ways that empower his own grasp on power, fame and fortune.
But truth in the real world is stubborn, and Arendt still harbors hope, “Truth, though powerless and always defeated in a head-on clash with the powers that be, possesses a strength of its own: whatever those in power may contrive, they are unable to discover or invent a viable substitute for it. Persuasion and violence can destroy truth, but they cannot replace it.”
So what ever your opinion of the press, and despite the flood of false and incendiary information on the web, “….facts possess an infuriating stubbornness.”
On the cusp of this upcoming election it is our job to find them.