Trump Didn’t Invent Lying, But He Took It to the Next Level

&c. by Jonathan Chait

 

 

Trump Didn’t Invent Lying, But He Took It to the Next Level

 

The Heritage Foundation is one of the most venerable organs of the conservative movement. It has helped steer policies and personnel for the Republican Party since Ronald Reagan’s time, and its pronouncements on any issue are almost always a barometrically accurate reading of the conservative line. This week, the foundation hosted a podcast with Julie Kelly, who endorsed Donald Trump’s conspiracy theories about the 2020 election and the January 6 insurrection.

Kelly used the discussion to unspool her theory that the events of January 6, 2021, were a massive plot by the Democrats. Why, you might be wondering, would the Democrats want to shut down the counting of electoral votes that were going to officially confirm Joe Biden’s presidential victory? Because they knew the Republicans had exposed their election-stealing plot. “The people who wanted the proceedings that day shut down were not Republicans; they were Democrats,” explained Kelly. “They did not want the airing of all of the evidence of fraud, which would be two hours per state.”

Kelly reveals that she grew suspicious that the events of January 6 were not as they appeared while she watched it happen. Her first clue was that Trump supporters hadn’t previously carried out a violent insurrection, so it seemed strange they would they start now:

It, first of all, was so out of character for any other Trump rally. How many rallies has he had, including huge ones, that had taken place in November and December late in 2020? None of them had turned violent. I mean, people just weren’t behaving that way. So I think that that really raised some red flags; it just looked so out of character.

The alternate explanation, that Trump supporters didn’t need to violently shut down the proceedings until the day the government was set to affirm the result, apparently did not occur to her.

Even more suspicious was the fact that observers started describing it as an insurrection right away:

And also just the instant branding of it as an insurrection. That word was planted, seeded very early that day, and then it just kept rolling. So you had lawmakers referring to it as an insurrection while it was going on. Joe Biden gave his speech at like 4 o’clock that day; he called it an insurrection. George W. Bush called it an insurrection. Like, where did this term come from?

So to me it just sounded like collusion. It was like a Fusion GPS–type orchestrated campaign, PR campaign, but then a little more sinister behind the scenes. Like, who provoked this?

Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photo: Roberto Schmidt/AFP via Getty Images

 

Kelly finds it difficult to believe various people could watch a mob beat up police officers and storm the Capitol in an attempt to install their leader in power and independently come to the conclusion that it was an “insurrection.” Ergo, they must have cooked it up secretly beforehand. A tough interview with probing questions could have served a valuable purpose in debunking Kelly’s wild claims. But this was not an interrogation. The interviewer, Heritage vice-president for communication Rob Bluey, not only served up a series of softballs but endorsed Kelly’s theories. (Bluey: “I imagine you’ve come under personal attack from those on the left for seeking the truth. What motivates you to keep going, and why should the American people still want these answers?”)

A tough interview with probing questions could have served a valuable purpose in debunking Kelly’s wild claims. But this was not an interrogation. The interviewer, Heritage vice-president for communication Rob Bluey, not only served up a series of softballs, but endorsed Kelly’s theories. (Bluey: “I imagine you’ve come under personal attack from those on the left for seeking the truth. What motivates you to keep going and why should the American people still want these answers?”)

So Kelly’s podcast is a sign the most influential Republican-aligned think tank is happy to endorse Trump’s view that the real insurrection took place on Election Day.

___

Will Saletan has an essay in the Bulwark making a simple — but, I think, fundamental — point: The building block of authoritarianism is lies. Trump and his supporters don’t actually say they disregard the principles of American democracy. Instead, they allege a fact pattern (most important, that Trump legitimately won the election) that makes them the heroes of democracy. From this, Saletan deduces that it is the lies, rather than any difference over abstract principle, that defines the authoritarianism of the right.

I think this is an important enough insight that it’s worth considering some implications. Most politicians lie. So why did this politician’s lie produce an authoritarian movement?

The answer, I believe, is most politicians operate in an atmosphere that restrains their lies. They may lie, and sometimes they will get away with it, but sometimes they won’t. Trump is different because he acts as if he has complete impunity to lie. His supporters will believe anything he says. Hence his famous observation that he could shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue without losing support — it’s not that his supporters condone cold-blooded murder, but he could make up any explanation for shooting somebody, and they would embrace it.

The operative factor is not lying, per se, but the lack of any corrective system to disincentivize a politician’s tendency to lie.

And here is where I think Trump really is a political innovator. He spent years avidly consuming right-wing media and has totally internalized its conventions. Trump understands that conservative media will rally around any Republican whom they see as fighting for their side. It doesn’t matter if they’re lying.

Previous Republicans have lied and counted on conservative media to back them up regardless. But no politician before Trump, or at least no national-level politician, made that dynamic the entire basis for their political strategy. Trump is a competitor in the marketplace who saw that a profitable strategy used by his competitors could be scaled up far beyond a level anybody had imagined. Saletan’s argument is that the end point of this dynamic is basically the total collapse of American democracy.

___

I wrote this week about the left’s refusal to acknowledge discrimination by elite universities against Asian Americans. The dynamic is that Harvard’s admissions process mostly revolves around measures of academic performance like grades, standardized-test scores, and extracurriculars. If Harvard admitted its class solely on these measures, Asian Americans would claim a huge share of spaces, so Harvard essentially caps their enrollment by using a subjective “personal” measure, which magically finds Asian Americans less appealing than any other ethnic group.

As I said, I sympathize with Harvard’s desire for a diverse campus, and I suppose the constraints of legal precedent force them into this ugly kludge. I simply can’t accept the left’s campaign to pretend it’s something other than what it is.

There’s one particularly shocking rationale I found recently that deserves a little more attention as an example of the lengths Harvard’s defenders are willing to go to deny the obvious. Janelle Wong, writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education in 2018 (when the Harvard case first emerged), proposed that Asian Americans’ high academic performance is the result of bias:

As a scholar, I know that some stereotypes of Asian-Americans can cut both ways. Perhaps some might see my high-schooler as a test-taking machine, but research shows that implicit bias toward Asian-Americans will lead most people, including his teachers, to raise their expectations of him and assume he has more academic potential than others. This in turn will very likely lead to the assignment of higher grades and even higher test scores.

Wong is arguing that Asian Americans get better grades and standardized-test scores because teachers, acting on the stereotypical assumption that Asian Americans are smart, raise their expectations, thereby causing them to perform better.

This finding would raise a couple major questions. First, if Asian American academic performance were the result of positive stereotyping, what caused the stereotype to begin with? It’s not like Western culture has always seen East Asians as inherently advanced — one takeaway I had from reading Hitler’s American Gamble is the United States and Britain consistently believed Japan was too primitive to threaten them. (Indeed, this stereotype was so strong that Americans persisted in believing the Germans had orchestrated and even helped carry out the Pearl Harbor attack.)

Learn more about RevenueStripe...

Second, if it’s true that higher expectations can trigger massive academic gains on the scale of the gap between Asian Americans and everybody else, shouldn’t we be using this insight to raise the performance of everybody else? If we’ve discovered a magic elixir to generate enormous academic gains, why are we only using it as a rationale to discriminate against Asian Americans?

I think the last question answers itself.

What’s especially galling is the combination of the left’s generalized skepticism toward standardized-test performance, which it dismisses as purely an artifact of privilege, combined with its credulity toward Harvard’s home-brewed “personal” ratings. Progressives have grown so skeptical of standardized-test scores that they’re pushing to minimize or disregard them from magnet schools and universities everywhere. Standardized tests are biased, man. But Harvard’s formula finding Asian kids have less likability, courage, kindness, and other virtues? Well, that’s just science.

____

The Trump presidential records scandal, which involves such measures as the president literally flushing papers down the White House toilet, has the familiar Trumpian combination of being alarming, hilarious, and unlikely to bring him down at the end of the day.

While his record destruction was a black-letter violation of the law, apparently it’s difficult to prosecute in the absence of evidence he intended to destroy something incriminating. The Washington Post reported recently:

“There is a high bar for bringing such cases,” said Charles Tiefer, former counsel to the House of Representatives who teaches at the University of Baltimore School of Law. 

Typically, he said, records preservation proceeds by mutual agreement with the occupant of the White House, staff and archivists. “But if there is willful and unlawful intent” to violate the law then the picture changes, he said, with penalties of up to three years in jail for individuals who willfully conceal or destroy public records.

“You can’t prosecute for just tearing up papers,” he said of Trump. “You would have to show him being highly selective and have evidence that he wanted to behave unlawfully.”

It very likely is the case that Trump destroyed records because he found them incriminating. He’s a huge crook! But the evidence for this would probably be found in the documents themselves. Which he conveniently destroyed.

Ah, well, nevertheless.