World

Moment of truth: is 3rd November the day the lying stops working?

Trump sought to undermine the foundations of civil society. But no onslaught of deceit can last forever

October 27, 2020
Photo: Lev Radin/SIPA USA/PA Images
Photo: Lev Radin/SIPA USA/PA Images

“We can’t just say, ‘Oh, it’s fine if a President lies 50 times a day’… No!”

And thus was Barack Obama, the 44th US President and one of the greatest orators of his day, reduced to monosyllabic outrage by the behaviour of his successor. Obama was speaking last weekend in Miami, Florida, one of the key swing states in the US election. Voters there have been told, among other things, that coronavirus is on its way out and will soon be gone, and that President Biden would lead a socialist administration which would impoverish all citizens. At least, that is what the current President has told them—four of his 50 lies a day.

It is tiring trying to keep up with the consistent level of deception and mendacity that emerges from the Trump regime. The Washington Postcalculated that the President had made over 20,000 false or misleading statements by this summer, and that was before the election campaign reached top speed.

His former strategy advisor, Steve Bannon, had said the administration should “flood the zone with shit”—that is, maintain a frenzy of distracting and misleading statements to keep the media and opponents busy and exhausted. It has kept the show on the road—until the facts of Covid-19 proved unignorable and impossible to distract from.

Is it naïve to worry about lying politicians? We don’t expect wholly accurate and 100 per cent truthful statements from them at the best of times. They prefer not to admit to mistakes, and tend to offer a hyperbolic interpretation of events, especially when elections are drawing near.

But when the supposed “leader of the free world” is unable to answer questions truthfully—indeed, no longer seems able to distinguish fact from fiction, preferring instead to inhabit his own fantastical version of reality—then we all have a problem. It is one we are all too familiar with, but it’s worth examining more closely as we enter the final hours of the 2020 campaign.

The President of the United States is the most closely watched leader in the world. What he (there has not yet been a she) does in that job matters. When lying becomes as normal as breathing, not just second nature but first nature, a terrible example is set. And as long as that President appears to be getting away with the lies, other leaders are encouraged to act in a similar fashion.

What started out as an approach to deal-making in business—“truthful hyperbole,” as Trump called it in his book (ghosted by Tony Schwartz) The Art of the Deal—has become standard operating procedure. Psychologists have long known that lying seems to get easier for those do it a lot. The rest of us just have to put up with it, for now.

But this, too, is tiring, and bad for our mental health. It pollutes the public conversation. It upends norms and undermines the foundations of civil society. Most of us were brought up to tell the truth and not lie, and were taught that, although the arc of history is long, “it bends towards justice.” Trump, and his populist, demagogic admirers and emulators around the world, are an intense challenge to all this.

They are a challenge to progress, also. Since the Enlightenment it has been almost unquestioned, universally accepted, that facts, truth and honesty are virtues worth observing and respecting. Post-modernists and moral relativists might find this dull and backward-looking. But 18th-century thinkers won vital intellectual battles, and these victories paved the way for the freedoms we still enjoy today.

As the US academic Lester Gilbert Crocker wrote of them: “Fundamentally, those who upheld the side of truth were believers in what we today call democracy: for their stand was founded on faith in the people, faith in their ultimate discernment of the good and the true.”

We cannot say we weren’t warned. As CBS television’s Lesley Stahl revealed two years ago, Trump had already explained to her why he would continue to attack the media and claim that everything (critical) they said was “fake news.” “You know why I do it?”, he told her in the summer of 2016. “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.” It is perhaps no coincidence that Trump objected to Stahl’s entirely reasonable line of questioning on 60 Minutes last week.

This onslaught of deceit is tiring for citizens; it is tiring for journalists also. Your sympathy may be limited for such people. But without a vigorous free press we are all vulnerable. And if bad editorial judgments are being made the flow of disinformation goes unchecked.

In the UK, Prime Minister Boris Johnson has deployed Trumpian techniques in his dealings with parliament and the press. A year ago he said that, as far as his past working relationship with the American businesswoman Jennifer Arcuri was concerned, “there was no interest to declare.” (She had received considerable amounts of funding while he was Mayor of London.) But now Arcuri has explained that, on the contrary, there very much was an interest to declare. Has the fearless British press pursued this apparent contradiction? It has not.

Look, everyone is tired. Biden may well have spoken for much of the electorate when, exasperated with his opponent in debate, he said to the President: “Will you shut up, man?!” Trump has tried to deny the reality of what is happening in America but, as CNN’s Brian Stelter suggested the other day, reality is winning.

Sometimes the lying has to stop. It is not just the US, but the whole world, which is facing a moment of truth on 3rd November.