From time to time, one of my old high-school friends who is MAGA posts something like the following on Facebook: “Hey, libtards, you keep saying Donald Trump is dumb, but if he’s so dumb, how come he got elected president twice, overcoming your relentlessly corrupt attempts to steal the 2016 and 2024 elections, and escaped your nefarious deep-state schemes to put him behind bars?” This is supposed to be some kind of killer put-down that leaves people like me stammering.
The answer to how Trump has succeeded is really simple: He lies nonstop, and lying works. Sure, there are other factors in play—he tapped into and intensified a certain strain of profound proletarian resentment of liberal elites, and … well, that’s about it. But mostly, it’s the lies.
Before I dig into this, let me define the word “lie” as I mean it here, since lies can take many different forms. The standard Trump lie is a simple blanket assertion of non-fact as fact. He does this many times a day. A notable if all-too-common example emerged last Saturday morning, when he “Truthed” (oh the layers of irony!) that he had “JUST GOTTEN THE HIGHEST POLL NUMBERS OF MY ‘POLITICAL CAREER.’” He sometimes veers into the deeper, more Goebbels-y lie of saying the exact opposite of the truth (Joe Biden stole the 2020 election), but most of his lies are of the more straightforward variety—up is down, black is white, the classics.
We tell ourselves that we live in a free society with a Fourth Estate that calls out lies and holds liars accountable. And furthermore, we teach our children not to lie and warn them of consequences should they do so. In such a society, lying should not work. So why does it?
It works on the public stage (private life is a different matter) because in that sphere, someone who lies all the time creates reality, or I should say “reality.” Think about it. Say four guys are sitting in a bar having a sports argument—talking about the upcoming college football playoffs, say. They begin by agreeing that Ohio State is the favorite because it is currently ranked number one in the polls, which it in fact is.
But one of them says: No, Texas A&M is number one. The other three look at him like he’s insane. They reach for their phones, they tap, tap, tap, and they show him the rankings. But he keeps insisting. Those polls are fake. It’s Texas A&M. Everybody says so.
The conversation stalls. The liar has “won” the argument. Not in the sense that he is factually correct; he is not. But he has won in two senses. First, he has shut down what might have been a rational, interesting, spirited debate that proceeded from shared factual premises. Second, he has forced the other three to waste time and mental energy debating a proposition that is not remotely up for debate, and in the process has succeeded in making himself the center of attention and controversy whom everyone else talks about.
Well, you say, the other three could just ignore him, and in my example, it’s possible that they could. But now imagine that these four and their views are highly regarded by the other 100 patrons in the bar—that they direct the conversation, and the others listen to them and follow their lead. And imagine further that over the years, our Texas A&M acolyte has won the intense loyalty of 40 or 45 of the other patrons, such that they, too, adopt the position that the Aggies are in fact number one. Now, the entire bar is enmeshed in silly, pointless controversy.
And finally, imagine one more thing. Imagine that our A&M partisan and his followers not only say of the Buckeye adherents that they are wrong. No! They accuse them of moral turpitude. They charge that believing that Ohio State is number one is a sign of confusion, weakness, depravity; un-Americanism, even. They do so with a singular conviction and vigor, enough that the 10 or 15 patrons in the bar who don’t follow college football at all and don’t know who’s really number one emerge genuinely confused and perhaps even inclined to believe them.
That’s how lying in the public sphere succeeds. And, to reiterate, Trump tells many such lies a day. He talks to the press two or three times a day most days, which probably adds up to what, 45 minutes, an hour? Spitballing it at one lie every two minutes, which may well be low, that’s around 25 factual lies a day. (This is commonly referred to as a “gish gallop”—a torrent of lies that comes so relatively hot and heavy that the truth can’t find a purchase.)
Who can keep up? No one can. I complain a lot about the mainstream media, and with good reason—they spent years repeating Trump’s incessant lies in the interest of “fairness” (and they still do it too much). But this is one aspect of their task that even I concede is well-nigh impossible. A news outlet would need a staff of at least, oh, 15 people to really keep assiduous track of all that lying. No one can do that these days.
Besides which, it’s human nature when confronted with a flood of lies to just give up at some point. Run up the white flag. If someone is telling you the sky is green and the grass is blue, at first you’ll argue with him. Then you’ll walk him outside to show him. But when he continues to insist on it, you’ll give up.
This and nothing else is the secret of Trump’s success. He wins by wearing honest people down. After 10,000 or 20,000 or 50,000 such lies, Trump has distorted “reality” wildly in his favor. And, crucially, he has an entire political party and multi-million dollar propaganda outlets repeating and reinforcing the lies. He, and they, have convinced about 40 percent of the country that Ohio State isn’t number one, metaphorically, and that you have to be a communist to think so. And they’ve cast enough doubt in the minds of about 10 percent of the country so that they don’t know what to think.
But here’s the good news: I sense that this is finally changing.
I wrote above that Trump has an entire political party behind him. Well, not quite—now that’s minus one. I’m not going to ladle praise on Marjorie Taylor Greene here, but I will give her this much: Whatever her motivations, she stood up to the guy. Ditto Tom Massie. Their actions are communicating to the MAGA base in a way no Democrat could that Trump is lying about Jeffrey Epstein in some way, shape, or form. The seed is thus planted in the collective MAGA mind that Trump might sometimes be full of beans.
There are other encouraging signs that the lies may no longer be working. The more Trump keeps bragging about the greatest economy in the history of the mind of God, the more people will see him as a conman. How anybody was dumb enough to believe last year that he could lower prices is another question, but for present purposes, he can’t convince most people that they’re not seeing what they’re seeing when they go to the supermarket.
America may also begin to see this week the all-too-real consequences of his foreign-policy lying. Trump has given Volodymyr Zelenskiy until Thursday to agree to the 28-point “peace” plan that he and his people drew up with the Kremlin that gives Ukraine almost nothing. If Zelenskiy hasn’t agreed by Thanksgiving, Trump says, he’s on his own. It’s a morally repugnant position for a president of the United States to take, and while I’m not naïve enough to expect that most Americans care passionately about Ukraine, they will grasp the fact that Trump has spent two years lying repeatedly about how easy negotiating peace in that conflict would be.
Reality is finally starting to catch up with Trump. And so, to answer the MAGA crowd’s Facebook question more fully: He only looks smart because his lies have overwhelmed a political culture that didn’t know how to respond to them. If I were a Trump fan, I’d start worrying about what happens when that stops.
