WHAT’S BEHIND TRUMP’S AVALANCHE OF LIES ─ PART 1 OF 2

Necessary to Understand Donald’s ‘Strategic & Instrumental’ Rhetoric!

Donald Trump

by Selvam Canagaratna-July 6, 2019, 7:26 pm

"The great masses of the people . . . will more easily fall victim to a big lie than to a small one."
– Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, 1924.

Donald Trump has told 10,000-plus lies, or ‘misstatements’, since taking office as President, and "What sense have we made of them?" asks Paul Rosenberg in the first of a two-part series on the Salon website, adding: "What sense can we make of an avalanche of lies designed to overwhelm our capacity to make sense of anything? The second question is also important: What can we do about them?"

The media shouldn’t be repeating them, giving Trump’s lies more life, he writes, but unfortunately that’s exactly what they’re doing – as much a 19 times a day on average!

That’s what we shouldn’t be doing, says Rosenberg. But what to do instead? That, he says, should be informed by knowledge and understanding – first about the nature of Trump’s lies themselves, and then, more broadly about how they function and what they’re intended to do.

We can make a start in two ways: First, by looking more closely at Trump’s most frequent lies and considering how we might build on our knowledge of them, to cover all his lies more responsibly; second, by considering what academic researchers have found, which can help inform and direct us moving forward. Beyond that, however, the real work lies in coming to grips with Trump's use of rhetoric, and the threat that poses to democracy and the institutions and values on which it depends.

Trump’s most frequently repeated falsehoods are those The Washington Post now identifies as ‘bottomless Pinocchios.’ Most frequent of all is his claim that his "big, beautiful wall" is already being built – a false claim repeated 160 times. Trump’s only other false claims that come close are his overstating the impact of trade deficits (147 times), claiming his tax cut was the biggest in history (143 times), and claiming that the US economy has never been stronger (134 times).

The cut-off for bottomless Pinocchios is 20 repetitions, and the bottom two – at 22 repetitions each – are falsely claiming to cut the cost of the F-35 jet and wildly exaggerating the costs of illegal immigration, which is quite likely a net benefit to the country.

A better sense can be gained by grouping the bottomless Pinocchios by subject matter, which give us the following set of totals:

* 505 lies about immigration

* 402 lies about Trumps economic accomplishments

* 143 lies about exaggerated military spending

* 127 lies about Trump himself being persecuted

It’s hardly an accident, or a surprise, that the top two subjects of Trump’s lies revolve around the so-called issues that made him President – his racist appeals to fears and hatred of immigration and his bogus claims of brilliant business success – exposed as never before in the recent New York Times tax record exposé.

One could also count 101 lies relating to alleged Democratic collusion – 66 alleging that the Democrats were the ones who colluded with Russia (counted above under "lies about Trump being persecuted), and 35 claiming that Obama gave $150 billion to Iran."

Grouping Trump’s false claims under broad categories this way highlights the false attacks he’s mounting against others, as well as the false glory he’s trying to claim for himself.

In a note at the end of their story, Post fact-checkers pointed to three examples of academics using their fact-checking data for important purposes. In December of 2017, UC Santa Barbara psychologist Bella DePaulo reported (in the Post and Psychology Today) that Trump lied a lot more, and a lot more viciously, than most people do.

In her earlier work, she had found that most lies are either self-serving, or meant to flatter others – with the former about twice as common. Only around 1 to 2% of lies were defined as cruel. Trump, in contrast told 6.6 times as many self-serving lies as kind lies, and fully 50% of his lies were cruel.

In addition DePaulo wrote, Trump’s lies "often served several purposes simultaneously (for example, sometimes they were both self-serving and cruel)." This last point echoes something noted above: One bottomless Pinocchio may fit into two different categories of lies, serving to advance two different agendas. Trump’s use of lies to serve multiple purposes should surely be a central focus of attention moving forward.

In May 2018, Tali Sharot of University College London and Neil Garrett of Princeton addressed the increased pace of Trump’s lying, from about five false claims a day during his first 100 days to nine a day from March 1 to May 1, 2018. They pointed to their own research as well as other studies showing that "our response to our own acts of dishonesty is strong at first, but over time decreases," a process they dubbed, "emotional adaption." They also cited other research showing that "individuals adapt not only to their own dishonesty but also to that of others," and pointed to other evidence that Trump’s dishonesty hadn’t diminished his support.

If anything, these findings are cautious or understated, given how Trump’s pace of lying has continued to skyrocket. The Post itself recently reported, "All told, the President racked up 171 false or misleading claims in just three days, April 25-27. That’s more than he made in any single month in the first five months of his presidency." Trump’s escalation of lying deserves focused attention as well.

"Trump’s lies fall into different categories, such as hyperbole and humbug, like P.T. Barnum," said Jennifer Mercieca, a historian of American political rhetoric and Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at Texas A&M University, "but also more menacing categories of speech that border on authoritarianism. Trump proclaims his truth as the one and only truth and asks his audiences to deny their own perception of reality. It's a pre-Cartesian view of truth – ‘truth’ is no longer what we perceive (I think, therefore I am), but what Trump says is true.

"Folks who call it a form of ‘gaslighting’ are correct," Mercieca added. "Trump’s constant blizzard of lies denies us the possibility of knowing. It’s its own epistemology. And if that doesn’t frighten you, the constant barrage of lies are authoritarian – they are used to prevent him from being held accountable for his words and actions."

But the lies don’t just work in isolation, she noted:

"The lies serve in conjunction with his other rhetorical strategies to attract attention, control the national dialogue, and distract our attention. I write about how he routinely uses ad hominem attacks, ad baculum threats of force, reification (treating people as objects), ad populum (appealing to the wisdom of the crowd), American exceptionalism, and paralipsis (I'm not saying, I'm just saying). The lies are part of all of those strategies. He lies when he attacks, he lies when he praises, he lies and lies and lies. There is no truth that matters.

"It’s this kind of framing of Trump’s lies that’s been so dramatically and tragically absent from virtually all mainstream media coverage. What I wrote earlier about categorizing Trump's lies ties in directly here."

Mercieca’s rhetorical distinctions‚ notes Rosenberg, suggest further ways of refining how we categorize Trump’s lies: ad hominem attacks against groups and individuals, for example, or categories of who is being threatened or treated as an object. We also need to use these categories to critique Trump’s rhetoric holistically – not just keep track of his blatantly false statements, but also the threats, promises and postures that serve as their oxygen."