Distinction Without A Difference-- Gaslighting Is The Best Way To Describe What Trump And Biden Do Anyway

Valley Girl seemed all worked up the other day, after reading a 2017 Vox post by Matty Iglesias, about the difference between a liar and a bullshitter. I can see exactly what must have attracted her to it: "Donald Trump’s disregard for the truth is something more sinister than ordinary lying." By today she was telling me she didn't care if I ran it or not or to rewrite it. Rewiting it means going someplace neither she nor Iglesias had much interest in going: why Biden seems to want to compete with Trump for the position of biggest liar in politics. Neither of them should be anywhere near politics because, as Iglesias described Trump, they both say "a lot of things that aren’t true, often shamelessly so, and it’s tempting to call [Trump] a liar." It's also tempting to call Biden a liar, something I do frequently-- like earlier this evening. We even have a meme for it, not used earlier but... enjoy:

Valley Girl and Iglesias seem to want to put a lot of stock in Harry Frankfurt, a Princeton philosophy professor, who that "to lie presumes a kind of awareness of and interest in the truth-- and the goal is to convince the audience that the false thing you are saying is in fact true." OK, that describes Trump and Biden both. But Iglesias claims that "Trump, more often than not, isn’t interested in convincing anyone of anything. He’s a bullshitter who simply doesn’t care."

Bah! Iglesias has probably realized by now that Trump is-- and has always been-- all about manipulation. (So is Biden.) Sure, both of them are suffering from some increasing degree of senility and sometime lie inadvertently, but they both have hideously long records of lying their asses off, especially when cornered for an earlier lie. VG had this more on point that Iglesias. She suggested a revision: "Trump is always interested in convincing everyone that he is a Stable Genius. That he is a Stable Genius is something Trump does indeed care deeply about." Back to Iglesias:

In Trump's own book, Crippled America: How to Make America Great Again, our now-president describes himself in a way that Frankfurt could hold up as the quintessential example of a bullshitter. Trump writes that he’s an "I say what’s on my mind" kind of guy. Pages later, he explains that doesn’t mean he’s necessarily an honest guy.

"If you do things a little differently," he writes of the media, "if you say outrageous things and fight back, they love you." The free publicity that results from deliberately provoking controversy is invaluable. And if a bit of exaggeration is what it takes, Trump doesn’t have a problem with that. "When," he asks "was the last time you saw a sign hanging outside a pizzeria claiming ‘The fourth best pizza in the world’?!"

When Trump says something like he’s just learned that Barack Obama ordered his phones wiretapped, he’s not really trying to persuade people that this is true. It’s a test to see who around him will debase themselves to repeat it blindly. There’s no greater demonstration of devotion.

In his first and best-known book, The Art of the Deal, Trump writes a passage [Trump wrote no passages-- that's a lie as well. Tony Schwartz wrote the entire book] that is one of the most remarkable ever set to paper by a future American president. It’s deeply telling about Trump’s views on the distinction between integrity and loyalty. Trump sings the praises of Roy Cohn-- Joe McCarthy’s infamous legal attack dog later turned Trump mentor:

Just compare that with all the hundreds of “respectable” guys who make careers out of boasting about their uncompromising integrity but have absolutely no loyalty. They only care about what’s best for them and don’t think twice about stabbing a friend in the back if the friend becomes a problem. What I liked most about Roy Cohn was that he would do just the opposite. Roy was the kind of guy who’d be there at your hospital bed long after everyone else had bailed out, literally standing by you to the death.

Trump, ironically, would not stand by Cohn’s deathbed as he perished of AIDS; instead, he disavowed his friend. For Trump, loyalty is a way to size up those around him, suss out friend from foe. It is not a quality he cares to embrace in his personal life. Now president, it’s the same in his political life.

The two passages taken together illuminate an important facet of Trump’s personality, and of his presidency. He’s a man who doesn’t care much about the truth. He’s a man who cares deeply about loyalty. The two qualities merge in the way he wields bullshit. His flagrant lies serve as a loyalty test.

Trump’s tactics, in a different context, would be understood as typical authoritarian propaganda-- regimes often propound nonsense more to enforce expectations on their citizens than because they are expecting anyone to actually believe it. The United States isn’t the kind of place where that can work. There’s a free and vibrant press and political debate operating wholly outside the world of Trump’s bullshit. But by filling the heads of his fans-- and the media outlets they consume-- with a steady diet of bullshit, Trump is nonetheless succeeding in endlessly reinscribing polarization in American politics, corroding America’s governing institutions, and poisoning civic life.

At this point VG called foul. "Trump’s tactics are typical authoritarian propaganda. The United States is now the kind of place where that can work (thanks to Trump). There is not a free and vibrant press and political debate operating wholly outside the world of Trump’s bullshit. Think of the New York Times and sycophant Trump enabler Mags Hab (Maggie Haberman).

  This all seems incredibly pointless to me and in the end, I suspect it did to VG as well, since she asked me to think about not running it at all. Iglesias' fascination with On Bullshit, Frankfurt's book.

As Frankfurt put it in his groundbreaking essay “On Bullshit,” “one of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit.”

Frankfurt attempts to give the term definition that distinguishes the bullshitter from the liar, with the most salient distinction being that the liar is genuinely trying to trick you.

“The bullshitter,” by contrast, “may not deceive us, or even intend to do so, either about the facts or about what he takes the facts to be.”

The liar wants to be seen as the one telling the truth. The bullshitter just doesn’t care. That’s Trump. During the course of the 2016 campaign, he said over and over again that America is “the highest-taxed nation in the world,” which isn’t even remotely close to being true. But he kept saying it, despite having been called out repeatedly, and then he said it again in a recent interview with The Economist.

Trump says, over and over again, that he won one of the greatest Electoral College landslides in history. It’s not true, it’s obviously not true to anyone who bothers to look it up or remembers any past presidential elections, and it’s not even remotely clear why it’s important. But Trump keeps on saying it.

This is just how Frankfurt defines bullshit:

For the bullshitter, however, all these bets are off: he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says. He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.

This is a perfect portrait of a typical Trump statement. His assertions about policy matters are often so garbled as to make it nearly impossible to work out what he’s even trying to say in order to evaluate its truth or falsity.

The reason is that Trump is often completely indifferent to accuracy. His administration, like all administrations, sometimes tries to sell the public on something or other using tactics that are at times deceptive. But where he breaks from the mold is in the sheer quantity of things he seems to say for no reason at all, utterly outside the context of a planned sales pitch.

The annals of Trumpdown are simply littered with this kind of casual, fundamentally pointless falsehood:

• He told The Economist that he invented the phrase “prime the pump.”
• He says China stopped manipulating its currency only after he won the election.
• He says “millions” of illegal voters cost him the popular vote.
• He claims to have had an incredibly productive first 100 days in office.
• He says labor force dropouts are counted as employed by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
• He says Germany and other NATO members owe money to the United States.

None of this is useful in moving the ball forward on any kind of policy goal. And indeed, Republicans on Capitol Hill and even in the executive branch typically groan about these outbursts of Trumpian bullshit that throw their work into chaos and tend to at least temporarily derail the GOP’s substantive goals. But Trump not only keeps bullshitting, he tends to demand that his team offer a zealous defense of whatever bullshit he happens to spout on any given day-- putting staffers and legislative allies in the untenable position of defending the indefensible.

OK, so now you know everything there is to know on the subject-- especially if you followed the link to Iglesias' post and watched the two videos. So please tell me, who's more the liar and who's more the bullshitter between Trump and Biden? And if you want to really get down, include Mayo Pete, the boy from McKinsey, in there too.