The Art of the Bullshitter

Eli Lake, The Free Press

 

They’re eating the cats. I’ll build a great wall, and Mexico will pay for it. It was the biggest inauguration crowd ever.

I used to think the proper response to Donald Trump’s bullshit was through the sober, fact-based lens of journalism. But, over the past decade, I’ve changed my mind. I now think that asking journalists to pour the best years of their lives into fact-checking him is as daunting and pointless as asking Siskel & Ebert to review the entire Pornhub back catalog.

Most Trump supporters know it’s fake, and they don’t care. In fact, Trump’s propensity for bullshit is not a political liability, it’s a superpower. 

Let me explain. It’s not true that Haitians in Ohio were eating the cats and dogs. It is true that a lot of migrants have been arriving into the country illegally. And that’s an awkward fact for the Democrats in an election year. They’d rather the electorate look elsewhere, but Trump’s bullshit about eating cats forced voters to face a truth his opponents wished to conceal. 

And here’s the magic trick: When Trump does assert something outrageous like the migrants are coming for our pets, he’s basically buying his own convenient bullshit. That’s not quite the same thing as lying. 

The Flimflam Man

Of course, Trump does lie—all politicians do, and he probably lies more than most, but his genius exists outside the binary of truth and lies. It’s the netherworld of flimflam, hyperbole, sales pitches, and ad copy delivered with the quiet dignity of a wet T-shirt competition. Trump is a very modern artist: weaving, as he likes to say, a barrage of anecdotes, fake and real statistics, gossip, and memes into a nebulous and suggestive species of patter. To put it the way the maestro might: A lot of people are saying Donald is the Greatest Bullshitter of All Time. 

And that’s why the Democrats get Trump so wrong. They have tried to paint him as an American Hitler, a Russian agent, a man consumed with evil and hatred. 

But what they fail to understand is that Trump’s casual relationship to the truth is an echo of great politicians in the past. He is hardly the first bullshitter to ascend to the White House; he’s just the best to ever do it. In this respect, Trump is the crack-cocaine variant of many of his predecessors. Ronald Reagan was a folksy, sentimental bullshitter, as if a president was a Hallmark greeting card. Bill Clinton was a slick bullshitter, a genius at spinning stories at the dawn of the cable news era. And let’s not forget that when then-Vice President Richard Nixon wriggled out of a scandal in his famous Checkers speech, he was able to survive because he deflected a serious allegation about industrialists buying his influence by serving up a bunch of bullshit about his dog, Checkers. 

Lying and bullshitting are related, but the differences are important. The late philosopher Harry Frankfurt examined the distinction in his seminal tract: On Bullshit:

“The liar is limited by his commitment to saying something that conflicts with the truth. So there’s a constraint upon him that he has to respect. Whereas the bullshitter, who doesn’t care about truth, you know, can go anywhere he likes. And there’s a kind of a panoramic view that he can take that the liar can’t take, because the liar is limited to inserting in a specific place in the system of beliefs a false belief or a true one. Whereas the bullshitter can go anywhere he likes and draw any kind of picture or any kind of panorama of beliefs that serves his purpose.”

Doesn’t Frankfurt sum up the artistry of Trump? He makes vague provocative statements that are not really true or false: “Many people are saying. . . ,”  “It’s the biggest and most beautiful wall you’ve ever seen,” “You’re gonna get tired of winning.” Trump is painting a picture with his words of a reality he would like to see. He’s not conveying the world as it really is. 

According to Penn Jillette, the magician and debunker of flimflam, Trump “does in a very pure way demonstrate the difference between a lie and bullshit. 

“A lie is very respectful of the truth, in that it is denying it. And bullshit is saying anything that pops into your head.”

If you want to understand why Donald Trump may be on the verge of winning the White House again, you have to reckon with our own country’s relationship to bullshit. It pervades everything from our politics to our economy to our culture.  

To understand how Trump became the greatest bullshitter in American history, put politics aside for a moment. Think of advertising instead. 

Advertising is central to American life: It defines everything from the messages our politicians serve us to the videos your Instagram algorithm delivers. In this country, the persuasion industry is always booming.

As the late, great comic George Carlin put it: “Whenever you’re exposed to advertising in this country, you realize all over again that America’s leading industry. . . is still the manufacture, distribution, packaging, and marketing of bullshit.”

The Willingness to be Fooled

So where did this come from? The roots of hokum as commercial cajolery go back to the nineteenth century, a paradise for American bullshit artists. In this young nation, there was a hunger for spectacle. Traveling medicine shows promising miracle cures were indistinguishable from carnivals, as if both science and entertainment were performances requiring a suspension of disbelief.   

On July 5, 1810, a man was born in Bethel, Connecticut, who would take bullshit up a notch. His parents named him Phineas, but the world would know him as P.T. Barnum, the founder of the American circus. 

Barnum’s career as a celebrity entertainer began in 1835, when he purchased an enslaved woman in Kentucky named Joice Heth. She was blind and nearly entirely paralyzed. Barnum used her as a human curiosity, claiming she was the 161-year-old nanny of George Washington. Like Trump, Barnum professed to believe his own bullshit. 

The cliché “a sucker’s born every minute” is attributed to Barnum, but I suspect that much of his audience were not suckers. Maybe they knew that they were not actually seeing real mermaids, midget kings from faraway lands, or Washington’s ancient nanny. They just wanted to see what all the hype was about. They wanted a spectacle. It’s like people who attend magic shows. They know it’s not real. 

They’re in on the con.

This idea that sometimes the audience is willing to be fooled applies to many aspects of American life. It’s fun to believe the myth. In professional wrestling, this is known as kayfabe—a tacit agreement between performers and the audience to pretend that the show is real.  

When wrestling first became a big thing in the ’80s and ’90s—the time of Andre the Giant and Hulk Hogan—newspaper journalists ran stories trying to out the sport as fake, or scripted. This, they thought, was a killer scoop, a death knell to this phony sport built on lies. But it wasn’t. Wrestling fans didn’t care that it was fake, they were invested in the characters, the storylines, and the spectacle—not the authenticity.

Trump was with the fans. He loved the spectacle and the ostentatious bullshit of professional wrestling. He promoted WrestleMania IV in 1988, participated in ringside stunts, and maintained close ties with wrestling until his run for the presidency. So it was no surprise that Hulk Hogan, wrestling’s most iconic champion, was given a prime-time slot on the closing and most important night of the Republican convention.

And the crowd lapped it up when Hogan bellowed, “Let Trumpamania run wild, brother! Let Trumpamania rule again! Let Trumpamania make America great again!” 

Trump returned the favor during his acceptance speech: “And how about the Hulkster? How good was he? Boy, oh boy.”

It was a classic moment of appreciation. From one bullshitter to another, game recognizing game.

The journalist Matt Taibbi says he never paid attention to wrestling until someone pointed out how Trump was hyping the villain character—the heel—hurling insults and stoking anger in the crowd. But as he followed wrestling more closely, he saw that the roles of the combatants would morph, depending on circumstances in the ring: 

“The cool thing about wrestling and when you really get into it, it’s actually quite a subtle form of fiction where they are really carefully calibrating little tiny gradations of, you know, who’s the hero and who is the villain.”

And so it is with Trump, who can shape shift from heel to good guy—from immigrant-bashing bully to affable ally of the working class—in the span of a single speech.

The tradition of stretching the truth, as Mark Twain calls it in the first page of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, is a big part of our national politics. And even though there are polls going back decades that say voters seek authenticity in their candidates, deep down, I think, they also expect a baseline of bullshit. At least that’s what George Carlin thought: 

“I think people show their ignorance when they say they want politicians to be honest. What are these people talking about? If honesty were suddenly introduced into politics, it would throw everything off. The whole system would collapse. And I think, deep down, the American people know that. The American people like their bullshit out front, where they can get a good, strong whiff of it.”

Bullshit as a Presidential Art Form

We could list many presidents who trafficked in bunkum, but Bill Clinton is a great example of a master bullshitter who preceded Trump—Magic Johnson to his Michael Jordan, if you will. Perhaps the best example of his talent was Clinton’s lawyerly parsing in the Monica Lewinsky affair. Here’s how it started when Clinton faced the cameras in January 1998: “I want to say one thing to the American people. I want you to listen to me. I’m going to say this again. I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Ms. Lewinsky.”

And here’s how it ended up later in the year, with Clinton testifying by videotape as part of a grand jury investigation. When pressed on whether he had sex with the White House intern, Clinton responded:  “It depends on what the meaning of the word is is.”

What Clinton is saying here is, “I did not technically lie.” He’s wriggling out by claiming that whatever he did with Lewinsky, it did not entirely meet his definition of sex. Of course, whether or not he had intercourse with his subordinate was not really the point. His defense was bullshit. But it worked. 

Clinton’s approval ratings recovered after this scandal and impeachment. Americans hate a liar, but they tolerate a bullshitter.  

And Clinton is not the only one. Ronald Reagan loved to spin stories. He once told Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Shamir that he was part of a film crew that captured the liberation of a concentration camp. 

The classic Reagan example, though, came during the Iran-Contra affair, when the Reagan administration traded arms to Iran for the release of hostages and used the proceeds of the arms sale to fund anti-communist rebels in Nicaragua. 

When the story broke, Reagan insisted he did not trade arms for hostages. But a few months later, he told a different story. “My heart and my best intentions still tell me that’s true. But the facts and the evidence tell me it is not.”

So, in a sense, Trump is standing on the shoulders of giants—giant bullshitters. Indeed, Trump’s iconic slogan, “Make America great again,” was first crowd-tested in 1980 by Reagan on the campaign trail. 

In her excellent Trump biography, Confidence Man, Maggie Haberman writes that Trump’s early influences included Norman Vincent Peale, one of the great bullshitters of the twentieth century. Peale wrote The Power of Positive Thinking, a bestseller that popularized the idea that in order to accomplish your goals, you just had to imagine it really, really hard. Which, while not being necessarily bad 

advice, is also basically a bunch of bullshit.   

When Trump married his first wife Ivana Marie Zelníčková in April 1977, Peale presided over the nuptials. Throughout his life, when he faced bankruptcy, humiliation, or prison, Trump turned to positive thinking to blot out bad news. And Trump’s famous book, The Art of the Deal, was in some ways his own version of The Power of Positive Thinking—it was a skeleton key promising to unlock the inner success of anyone who bought it. Interestingly, it also had a very similar title to a book released more than a century earlier, The Art of Money-Getting, by the original bullshitter himself, our friend P.T. Barnum.

Trump always did have a knack for self-promotion, as all bullshitters do. He was able to create a persona of a gauche billionaire in the 1980s that made him a celebrity and a constant presence in the tabloids. The image of Trump as an unapologetically wealthy New York character made an indelible impression. He was in TV commercials and the movies. He was everywhere. 

Trump understood celebrity as a kind of currency, valuable for a man who had dreams of political power. And by the late 1990s, Trump explored a presidential run for the first time. Even though he was a big supporter of Bill Clinton, he made a brief bid for the nomination of Ross Perot’s Reform Party. 

From ‘The Apprentice’ to Birtherism

In 2004, Trump Hotels & Casino Resorts went bankrupt. But that same year, he found a lifeline—it was called The Apprentice. 

“NBC took a loser—a well-known loser, a dipshit—and created a persona of a successful businessman to make an interesting show,” recalled Penn Jillette, who appeared on All-Star Celebrity Apprentice with Trump, only to get fired by the future president. “Now, if you had gotten an actually good businessman for that role, the show would have been unwatchable.”

As Trump’s star rose with The Apprentice, he continued to test the waters of presidential politics. In 2011, he tapped into something potent, casting doubt on then-President Barack Obama’s heritage, demanding that he show his birth certificate to prove he was born in the United States. It became his next role, Trump the Birther. 

It was pure unadulterated bullshit. At one point, Trump even claimed he sent researchers to Hawaii to investigate the matter. In an interview with the Daily Caller, he said they “couldn’t believe what they’re finding.” Notice that Trump didn’t come out and accuse Obama of being born in Kenya, as less-skilled demagogues would. He didn’t make the mistake of Senator Joseph McCarthy, who claimed to have a list of names of Communist spies in the State Department, which he made up. No, Trump was just asking questions and expressing doubt. And the controversy he stoked repositioned Trump as a central character in American politics. 

Obama had released a short-form birth certificate showing that he was born in Hawaii in 1961. There was a birth announcement in the local newspaper. 

Questioning Obama’s status as an American was a bridge too far even for other populists in his party. And yet, despite this, Trump’s pressure forced Obama to allow his long-form birth certificate to be released to the public. 

Obama, though, would get his revenge at the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Dinner. 

“Donald Trump is here tonight,” Obama said. “And I know that he’s taken some flak lately. But no one is happier, no one is prouder to put this birth certificate matter to rest than The Donald. And that’s because he can finally get back to focusing on the issues that matter. Like, did we fake the moon landing? What really happened in Roswell, and where are Biggie and Tupac?”

After Obama roasted him in that room full of journalists and politicians, Trump privately seethed and plotted his revenge. And he finally got serious about running for president. On June 16, 2015, Trump descended an escalator at Trump Tower to announce his bid for the presidency. “That is some group of people,” he said to the gathering of curiosity seekers and reporters. “Thousands. So nice. Thank you very much. That’s really nice.” That is how Trump began his campaign. The first words out of his mouth were bullshit! There were not thousands of people at Trump Tower on that day, and you could tell because when he delivered his lines that would later yield raucous applause, the room was silent. 

The Stench of Russiagate

We all know what happened in the campaign. Trump performed a hostile takeover of the Republican Party and then won a squeaker against Hillary Clinton. In one sense, the election had a kayfabe quality. The Clintons attended Trump’s third wedding to Melania. Bill had golfed with Donald. Until 2016, Trump and the Clintons were plutocrats who went to the same galas. 

That said, the election was also vicious. Trump’s crowds would chant, “Lock her up.” He showed up at his second debate with Hillary Clinton with an entourage of women who had accused Bill of inappropriate sexual behavior. Hillary threw everything but the kitchen sink at him. But it’s worth lingering for a moment on her campaign’s most enduring line of attack, that Trump had colluded with Russia to win the White House.

On Twitter, during the campaign, Clinton touted an exclusive story from Yahoo’s Michael Isikoff that reported an ongoing FBI investigation into the Trump campaign. That story was generated from opposition research that Clinton’s own campaign had paid for. That research, collected by contractors working for a former British spy named Christopher Steele, was full of shit. And yet, for nearly three years, the media, the FBI, and the Democratic party acted as if Steele’s allegations were gold. 

Hillary Clinton would continue to tell this tall tale about Trump and Russia even after the Special Counsel’s investigation into the Russia allegations found no evidence that Trump or any Americans had conspired with Russia to influence the 2016 election. As she told CBS News in 2019, “I know that he knows this wasn’t on the level. I don’t know that we will ever know everything that happened. But clearly, we know a lot and are learning more every day, and history will probably sort it all out.” What began as a dossier of bullshit had flowered into a full-blown lie in a few short years.  

Russiagate, as it was known, was a huge political mistake, according to Matt Taibbi; since Trump has been in the public eye forever, he’s a totally known quantity. “When you point to Donald Trump and say, ‘This guy’s a Russian agent,’ it just didn’t click,” he said. 

The Consequences of Election Denial

Trump’s bullshit reached a zenith when he lost the 2020 election. On January 6, his belief in his own bullshit had alarming, violent consequences. And here it’s worth explaining that bullshit can be partly true or false, benign or toxic. Trump’s tantrums and inability to accept his defeat was sinister bullshit that millions of Americans cannot forget. 

The 2021 Capitol riot was a humiliating event for America. Many people, including those around Trump—like then-Vice President Mike Pence—genuinely believed the whole system hung in the balance. Any claim that the election was rigged was untrue, but many of his supporters were willing to form a mob in a doomed effort to prevent the peaceful transfer of power. They failed. The system survived. But only because enough of Trump’s own allies, like Pence and Attorney General Bill Barr, called bullshit on their commander in chief. 

Congress certified President Joe Biden as the winner of the election, and Trump left office. Many assumed that Trump had been damaged irreparably. But they were wrong: Trump’s supporters, the Republican Party, and a significant portion of the electorate all eventually forgave him. They forgave him just as many Americans forgave Bill Clinton a generation before. 

The Real Victims of Trump’s Deceptions

And that’s worth some reflection. Donald Trump is not unprecedented. He is not an alien force. He is a mirror. He reflects an America that runs on bullshit, that has become inured to bullshit, that has come to expect bullshit from its leaders. So when our elites insist that this is not the case, they come off as liars. And they also fail to grasp that sometimes even a bullshitter tells the truth. 

I don’t know if Trump will win this election. But the reason he has been able to get this far is because, for all of his bullshit, Donald Trump has been able to expose truths that our elites would rather conceal: whether that’s the crisis at the border, the bias of the media, or the very real sense that many Americans feel the system is rigged. 

Will Trump be able to solve these problems? Probably not. He never built the wall he promised. He also never had Hillary Clinton arrested. So when he threatens to deport millions of illegal immigrants, or impose a false peace on Ukraine, or prosecute what he has called the enemy within, it’s more likely than not that he’s bullshitting. It’s something that his enraged opposition might keep in mind. 

Trump’s real victims will not be the “deep state,” the media, or the Democrats. They made a mint the last time Donald Trump was president, as they posed as his “resistance.” Rather, the constituency most harmed by Trump are the segment of his supporters that are not in on the kayfabe. Put another way, Trump’s real victims are his marks, the voters that actually believe his bullshit.

 

~~ Eli Lake, The Free Press