Thinking About Truth

What ever happened to "objective truth"?

My Goodness there is a lot to think about at the moment! Ukrainian strikes and Western sanctions seem to finally be putting pressure on Vladimir Putin. As he weakens, Trump has made noises about changing sides to support Ukraine but, ever mercurial, we shall see what his position is next week. An ultimatum dressed as a “Peace Plan” has been presented to Hamas that could bring about an end to the Gazan genocide. Hamas has agreed to the principal points and has asked to negotiate key details like “who goes first”, how to verify and lock in promises on Israel’s behalf, the role of third parties and the timing of all this. A fraught process given the incentives for Netanyahu to renege and keep the genocide going.

Domestically, the Trump regime is transparently trying to cause issues which they will use to justify declaring an “insurrection” which would give the White House even more dictatorial powers. This last issue raises a key thought for me. I can’t comment on the specific actions, deployments, legal battles and street battles other than to suggest getting news from a variety of sources. My thought, however, is to do with the predicate for all this which is quite transparently a number of lies. The police forces of the various affected cities are not in any way overwhelmed by crime. In most cases, violent crime is down to historic lows (if you rashly assume that the actions of people in ICE “uniforms” are lawful).

But what, for Donald Trump is “Truth”? It has been widely reported for years that he is a habitual liar so that is not news. But I think there is a pattern to the way he lies. Let’s take a recent example. In a speech to some U.S. Navy sailors recently, Trump said the following (my transcript from watching the video):

“History will never forget that it was the SEALS who stormed the compound that Osama Bin Laden and put a bullet in his head. And please remember that I wrote about Osama Bin Laden exactly one year ago, exactly one year before he blew up the World Trade Center and I said “You gotta watch Osama Bin Laden” (and the fake news would never let me get away with that statement unless it was true) but I said one year before to Pete Hegseth. I said one year before ... where’s Pete? In the book I wrote, whatever the hell the title, I can’t tell you. But I can tell you there’s a page in there devoted to the fact that I saw somebody named Osama Bin Laden and I didn’t like and you gotta take care of him. They didn’t do it. A year later he blew up the World Trade Center. So we got to take a little credit because nobody else is going to give it to me. You know the old story.”

You may need to read that at least twice, he really is inarticulate and his “weave” is just a string of glitches caused by an unstructured mind. The main point, though, is that a year before 9/11 Trump said in a book and also to Pete Hegseth that Osama Bin Laden needed to be stopped but was ignored. Now I’m not going to lie. My initial thought was that this was total B.S. It was clearly not true in part and fantastically unlikely otherwise. However, like all decent lies, there is a vein of reality in this story.

So for the clearly untrue bit, which was probably just a clumsy ad lib by a somewhat senile old man, Pete Hegseth was not on the scene in 2000. In fact, at that stage he was just out of high school and was at Princeton studying Politics. Trump wouldn’t have known him and didn’t tell him anything.

About the book: Well, that year was the first time that Trump floated the idea of getting in to Politics. Despite being a failed Real Estate developer (who was not yet pretending to be a successful one on The Apprentice) Trump was still a rich guy, so he commissioned a writer named Dave Shiflett to ghost write a book called “The America We Deserve” which was published in January 2000. The fact that Trump couldn’t remember the name of it is unsurprising. If Tony Schwartz, who ghost wrote “The Art of The Deal” in 1987 is to be believed, Trump would have had almost no input to the book and is unlikely to have even read it. Shiflett’s book does however mention Bin Laden BUT merely to use him as an example of haphazard foreign policy:

“One day we’re told that a shadowy figure with no fixed address named Osama bin-Laden is public enemy number one, and U.S. jetfighters lay waste to his camp in Afghanistan. He escapes back under some rock, and a few news cycles later it’s on to a new enemy and new crisis.”

So, the bottom line is that the main point Trump was making is what most people would consider a lie. But it is a lie that he has been telling in various forms for many years. Does he consider it a lie? I would posit “not exactly”, not because he believes it but because it is representative of a special form of “truth”. As a lifelong fraud and con man, what is “true” for Trump is basically anything that he can get someone to believe. If they believe it, it is true enough for his purposes. Objective reality may define truth for most of us but to a con man it is not what is important.

So while we may see Trump’s lies as brazen and obvious, they are true enough to him because there are a lot of people who believe him. As his public profile has grown and he has achieved some sort of demi-god status in large parts of the American population, his lies have become even more obvious to most of us but we are not who he is talking to.

There is some artfulness to his lying. The throw away line “the media wouldn’t let me get away with it if it wasn’t true” supports his lie and he instinctually references a “witness” to corroborate it (albeit picking Hegseth is very clumsy). But these are the sorts of things that have millions of people thinking that he is the only person telling the truth while everyone else is out of step.

Sadly, although it is very dangerous it is kind of impressive.