We Still Dont Know What to Do With the Endless Stream of Trump Lies
Did you hear how Donald Trump didnt know about the most important U.S. defense alliance before he became president? Dont take it from me. Take it from the man himself.
I didnt even know what the hell NATO was too much before, but it didnt take me long to figure it out, like about two minutes, he said Tuesday at a rally in Florida. And the first thing I figured out was they werent paying. We were paying. We were paying almost fully for NATO. And I said, Thats unfair.
Its a good story, and its totally false. Trump has been complaining that other NATO members arent paying their rightful share for nearly four decades. Ive always felt that NATO and West GermanyI mean, we have all those troops over there; I feel that they should pay their way, he told CNNs Larry King in 1987. If you look at the payments that were making to NATO, theyre totally disproportionate with everybody elses. In a series of videos around the 2011 U.S. intervention in Libya, he repeatedly discussed American funding for NATO. In March 2016, he told CNNs Wolf Blitzer, Its costing us too much money, and frankly, they have to put up more money.
David A. Graham: What Trump did in Osaka was worse than lying
I could go on, but whats the point? As I wrote back in 2019, Trump is a master of what the philosopher Harry Frankfurt called bullshit. As a technical term, this is speech that might be false, but deception isnt the main point. The bullshitter does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.
The stream of bullshit, in the Frankfurtian sense, remains one of Trumps most potent tools. On the one hand, reporters cant quote Trumps false comments without caveat; on the other hand, the time spent debunking statements that were never designed to be true anyway distracts from important, fact-based conversations about actual problems. The issue with his NATO remarks is not that the anecdote is false; its that he is undermining Americas key alliance at a time when Russia is fighting a brutal war of annexation in Ukraine and threatening other European states, and Trump is, by his own account, happy to tell the Kremlin to go ahead.
Any Trump appearance has more in common with a comedy set than with a typical political speech. As in a comedy routine, listeners dont necessarily expect everything he says to be strictly true. Hasan Minhaj learned that a comic can get into trouble when his fans believe that he is strictly telling the truth and he is not, but Trumps fans are not so fastidious about facts. They are taking him seriously, not literally.
People were destroyed with the inflation, Trump said at another moment in his Florida rally. I dont even order bacon anymore. Bacons gone up like fiveI said, Its too expensive; I dont want it. I dont want it. No, its gone up many times, right?
Read: Taking Trump seriously, not literally
Well, no. The price of bacon is up about 17 percent since Joe Biden took office. Thats actually less than the overall rate of inflation; pork producers are concerned about a glut of pig meat. Maybe Trump just picked a random food item, but in any case, the story serves to illustrate an attack on Bidens handling of the economy. No one outside the pork industry cares a great deal whether the details are right, but the crowds listening to Trump do care about inflation. And those crowds are large. By his account, tens of thousands of people attended. By independent accounts, the number was just in the thousands. Does it matter?
