Donald Trump at a campaign rally in Albuquerque, New Mexico, on Thursday
Julia Demaree Nikhinson/AP
The below article first appeared in David Corn’s newsletter, Our Land. The newsletter comes out twice a week (most of the time) and provides behind-the-scenes stories and articles about politics, media, and culture. Subscribing costs just $5 a month—but you can sign up for a free 30-day trial.
For almost a decade, our world has been shaped and distorted by the lies of Donald Trump. He slithered his way into the White House eight years ago and was expelled four years later by popular demand. Yet like a monster in a horror film, he was not dispatched for good. He defied norms and the Constitution and attacked American democracy. He failed in his underhanded effort to overturn the election, but he succeeded in persuading millions of our fellow citizens to believe the baseless conspiracy theory that he had been swindled out of victory by a nefarious cabal of Deep State actors, the Democrats, the media, and other evildoers. That was quite the accomplishment. During his presidency, according to the Washington Post, Trump had made at least 30,573 false or misleading statements. (And the newspaper did not fact-check all of his utterances.) Yet he still maintained the trust of a large chunk of Americans.
Trump is unparalleled in the annals of deception. Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a New York University historian who studies authoritarianism, recently told me, “Trump is one of the most successful propagandists in history. He managed to convince tens of millions that he won a national election working not in a domesticated media system or a one-party state but in a fully pluralist media environment in a democracy. No one has ever done that on that scale. Also look at what he’s accomplished with the perception of January 6.”
As we approach yet another judgment day for Trump, like many of you, I remained puzzled by Trump’s ability to maintain his standing as a champion for so many Americans, despite his obvious lies and profoundly low and mean-spirited character. He’s a con man whose deceptions and hypocrisies are easy to detect (including his consequential lies about the pandemic and the assault on the US Capitol he incited). The question won’t fade: How does he get away with it?
He’s a con man whose deceptions and hypocrisies are easy to detect. The question won’t fade: How does he get away with it?
As we approach yet another judgment day for Trump, like many of you, I remained puzzled by Trump’s ability to maintain his standing as a champion for so many Americans, despite his obvious lies and profoundly low and mean-spirited character. He’s a con man whose deceptions and hypocrisies are easy to detect (including his consequential lies about the pandemic and the assault on the US Capitol he incited). The question won’t fade: How does he get away with it?
Not long ago, I came across an academic study that sought to answer this question. In 2018, Oliver Hahl of the Carnegie Mellon University Tepper School of Business and Minjae Kim and Ezra Zuckerman Sivan of the MIT Sloan School of Management published an article in the American Sociological Review titled “The Authentic Appeal of the Lying Demagogue: Proclaiming the Deeper Truth About Political Illegitimacy.” As they put it, they were looking to explain “a puzzling pattern that has been discussed widely since the 2016 U.S. presidential election…[H]ow can a constituency of voters find a candidate ‘authentically appealing’ (i.e., view him positively as authentic) even though he is a ‘lying demagogue’ (someone who deliberately tells lies and appeals to non-normative private prejudices)?” In short, how to understand Trump’s popular support.
This trio noted that during the 2016 campaign, Hillary Clinton “was harmed by the perception that she was inauthentic.” Fairly or not, many voters saw her as motivated by self-interest and not honest. But, they write, Trump was “perceived by his supporters as appealingly authentic despite abundant evidence that (1) he was at least as sensitive to private self-interest as Clinton, with no corresponding record of public service; (2) he was considerably more prone to falsehood than Clinton; and (3) he deliberately flouted many norms that had been taken for granted for many years and were widely endorsed.”
After reviewing existing literature on populist demagogues and conducting a couple of studies, these three academics derived an explanation. Here it is (without the citations):
We argue that a particular set of social and political conditions must be in place for the lying demagogue to appear authentically appealing to his constituency. In short, if that constituency feels its interests are not being served by a political establishment that purports to represent it fairly, a lying demagogue can appear as a distinctively authentic champion of its interests. As first noted by [political scientist Seymour Martin] Lipset, such a “crisis of legitimacy” can emerge under at least two conditions: (1) when one or more social groups are experiencing what we call a “representation crisis” because the political establishment does not appear to govern on its behalf; and (2) when an incumbent group is experiencing a “power-devaluation crisis” because the political establishment is favoring new social groups over established groups. These scenarios broadly reflect the basis for populist ideologies that promote a “politics of resentment,” whereby the aggrieved constituency comes to believe that the establishment’s claim to represent the interests of the “real people” belies an ulterior agenda they feel powerless to stop. As such, a candidate who engages in lying demagoguery can be perceived as bravely speaking a deep and otherwise suppressed truth. By flagrantly violating norms on which the establishment insists, and thereby earning the opprobrium of this establishment, the candidate appears highly committed to the interests of her constituency. By contrast, an earnest opposition candidate seems less authentic.
I would shorten their conclusion to this: Trump voters like the lying. Or, the lying is the point.
Trump’s boldly false proclamations—about himself, about his rivals and critics, about the world—are not a bug. They’re a feature. They demonstrate he is sticking it to the other side. To the elites, the media, the establishment, the government, academia, Hollywood, the libs, the woke crowd, the minorities, the…whoever it is his supporters resent, despise, or disregard. So if he lies about legal migrants eating pets, or about Kamala Harris being “low IQ,” not really Black, and a communist, or about schools performing gender-affirming operations on kids without their parents’ consent, or about doctors in Democratic states killing babies after they’re born, or about criminal gangs of foreign thugs conquering cities and towns across the Midwest, or about the US economy being a hellscape, or about his majestic accomplishments as president, or about evil Democrats purposefully bringing undocumented people (and criminals) into the United States to destroy the nation, or that you can’t cross the street these days without being mugged, raped, or killed, it doesn’t matter.
Certainly, some of Trump’s supporters buy his bunk. But I suspect many don’t care whether it’s true or not. For them, it’s truthy, in that it corresponds to what they feel and what they think may be true.
Trump is demonstrating that he does not play by the rules of the establishment that these people perceive (for an assortment of reasons) as the enemy.
His wild assertions, narcissistic boasts, and offensive insults need not be factual. Trump’s ability to say whatever the hell he wants is not for his cultish followers only telling it like it is. It is a sign of strength. It’s his way of giving the finger to them. Trump is demonstrating that he does not play by the rules of the establishment that these people perceive (for an assortment of reasons) as the enemy. That’s the same reason they are not put off by—or even embrace—his crudeness, mean-spiritedness, bigotry, misogyny, and racism.
Trump’s lying and indecency are evidence to them that he will do whatever it takes to be their hero. And some Trumpers probably envy his ability to say whatever he wishes and escape the usual consequences. Trump can pull all this off because millions want him to be able to pull it off. His lies are not merely a personal flaw. His manifold deceits and their acceptance by tens of millions are a sign that our politics, maybe our nation, is broken. How broken will be determined by what happens on Tuesday and in the days and weeks afterward.