A Twitter follower asked:
I suspect this particular lie sprang from pure delusion.
For me, though, what matters more are the historical patterns, and why 40% of voters—including many who know Trump is lying—line up behind him.
We know that lying is a fascist tool. We know that disinformation is used strategically by tyrants. We also know there are patterns. Trump, Putin, Orbán, and Bolsonaro use the exact same tactics. So did Mussolini. Ivan Ilyin explained why fascists leaders must lie.
Steve Bannon calls the strategy of rapid fire lies: “Flooding the zone with shit.”
We also know that Steve Bannon coached both Trump and Bolsonaro.
The Rand Corp. describes the “Firehose of Falsehoods,” a propaganda technique of overwhelming and wearing out the audience through rapid fire lies. We’ve read Georgie Orwell. We know the drill.
Most of us—unless we’re lucky—have had encounters with people who leave us wondering: “Is he deliberately lying? Does he believe his warped view of reality?”
Can both be true? Can a liar believe that his delusions are real, and tell a deliberate lie to get you to believe it, too?
So, back to the original question: was Trump delusional when he said the virus would disappear, or was he trying to con us?Cases right now are surging. Moreover, Trump has now acknowledged that maybe we should wear masks.
He has defended his downplaying of the virus by saying he feels the need to be a cheer leader:
He has also suggested that he wants to let the virus “wash over” the population, a suggestion that alarmed Fauci because it would mean mass death.
To orchestrate a situation in which people will allow the virus to “wash over” the nation, he has to lie. On the other hand, he’s clearly nuts (“nuts” is a technical term, right?)
The extent to which Trump’s lies spring from delusion, I think, involves some speculation.
Locating the problem in Trump’s psyche may obscure the larger patterns.
For example, locating the problem in Trump’s psyche obscures the fact that Trump’s lies are a direct outgrowth of decades of American right wing politics.
9/ Consider:
🔹McCarthyism
🔹Reagan’s “welfare queens”
🔹Embrace of the NRA
🔹The “Swift Boating” of John Kerry
🔹Climate change denial
🔹Birtherism
Locating the problem in Trump’s psyche can also give the false impression that removing Trump will solve our problems.
I suspect that some (definitely not all) Never Trumpers want to return to the Republican Party as it was in 2015.
So they harp on Trump’s mental unfitness because they want to see Trump as an aberration: Get rid of Trump and the Tea Party marches happily along.
Getting rid of Trump will not eliminate the conditions that allowed him to come to office.
We can look at Trump through various disciplines. We can take Timothy Snyder’s historical perspective. We can take Jason Stanley’s philosophical perspective.
We can take the sociological perspective by starting with Max Weber’s sources of authority, one of which is what today we might call a leadership cult.
Or we can turn to political psychology to understand why so many people prefer authoritarianism.
For me, history, sociology, philosophy, and political psychology are most useful because they help answer these crucial questions:
🔹Why do 40% of American voters still support Trump?
🔹What can we do differently to help prevent this from happening again?
Teasing out where Trump’s delusions end and his deliberate lying begins may be an interesting exercise, but I’m not sure it’s productive, or that— in the end— it matters.
Trump is the demagogue that Alexander Hamilton warned us about in the Federalist Papers #1:
