President Donald Trump, broadly speaking, is not at base a liar. Sure, almost every word out of his mouth is a lie. You don’t have to go back to his marriage vows to prove this; a simple survey of his 2024 campaign promises versus his results during the first eighteen months of his second term show it. He promised no foreign wars and bombed ten countries; he promised to release the Epstein Files and fought it; he promised to end warrantless FISA searches and lobbied to keep them going; he promised DOGE and tariff rebates to the American people and abandoned both, etc.
Presidents telling lies are nothing new; they’ve become an American tradition. President George H.W. Bush promised “read my lips, no new taxes.” Bill Clinton swore “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky.” George W. Bush attested that “anytime you hear anyone talk about wiretap, a wiretap requires a court order…nothing has changed.” Barack Obama vowed “we’re not going to use signing statements of doing an end-run around Congress.” And Joe Biden promised publicly that he never talked with Hunter Biden about his business in Ukraine (despite massive evidence he was working with them).
But I learned an important lesson a few years back about how Trump in particular is different from a now-defunct podcast called Unfilter. The podcast hosts posited that Trump was not a liar but instead is a bullshitter.
The key difference between a liar and a bullshitter is that a liar expects you to believe exactly what he says, i.e., to believe the lies. A bullshitter has no such goal; the only goal of a bullshitter is to provoke a particular reaction. The truth of what the bullshitter says is irrelevant; what he says could be true, a slight exaggeration, or a bold-faced lie. Whether people believe what the bullshitter says is entirely irrelevant, so long as the right people cheer the bullshitter’s trolling and the wrong people are outraged at his speech is all that matters.
It’s been said that Trump’s conservative supporters take him seriously but his liberal opponents take him literally. But the reality is that they’ve both fallen for his bullshitting. And the reason for it is the devolution of the kinds of people running for office in America in the twenty-first century into two categories: (1)Those who say absolutely nothing with a lot of words on the campaign stump, taking no positions whatsoever, or at least as few positions as possible and (2) those who say anything they can, no matter how implausible and contradictory, to get elected. Kamala Harris and Donald Trump are the archetypes of these styles of politicians, respectively. Harris literally had no positions to run on, other than that she was not Donald Trump. Of course, the former can only be successful electorally with a compliant establishment and subservient media which has successfully anathematized the latter. But even a loyal legacy media wasn’t enough for Harris in the era of podcasts overtaking legacy media in audience size.
The latter category of candidate includes (but is not limited to) most of the bullshitters running for office. And let’s face it, when you’re frustrated with the persistent non-answer answers candidates like Kamala Harris give to questions that the press and the voters pose, the type-two candidate can at least be entertaining, especially if they’re bullshitters. A lot of voters just said “I don’t know about Trump, but let’s take a chance and at least get a few laughs from this disastrous choice.”
Trump’s act was indeed funny for a while, as it was fun to see establishment zombies go into conniptions over some of the outrageous and implausible things he said. But the Trump act has been getting old for some time now. And the voters will probably be swinging back to the boring type-one candidate for the next election cycle. The type-one candidate is also frustrating to voters, however, so the bullshitter will be back in the future, without the orange spray-on tan.
So it’s important for Americans to study the bullshitter, partly because we likely have one for the next two years as president, but also because we will likely have another one as president again some time in the 2030s.
The bullshitter is always of low moral character, which is why he can never be relied upon to restrain the government or do anything worthwhile. You simply can’t trust a scumbag who lies all the time; you can’t take him seriously, as many MAGA loyalists did. And it’s beyond question that Trump has always been of low moral character. This has been evidenced by his own marriages and affairs, as well as attacks on widowers Joe Kent and Thomas Massie over re-marrying (especially since Trump killed Joe Kent’s wife, as she died on a deployment in Syria which Trump approved as president). But Trump is not just low in character sexually for paying off porn stars, but in business; he tried to get an old lady named Vera Coking thrown out of the home she had owned for decades using eminent domain, among other property owners, in order to build his Atlantic City Trump Casino (a business that eventually went bankrupt).
Trump should have been identified as a useless bullshitter from the very moment he coasted down the escalator back in 2015 as he announced his first presidential candidacy, but Americans hadn’t elected someone similiar since Franklin Delano Roosevelt. We hadn’t experienced his kind in our lifetimes, so he was chosen by enough voters over the most hated woman in America, Hillary Clinton.
American voters can avoid bullshitters in the future by putting a premium on demanding more honesty from their politicians as a first step, and only after that looking at their stated positions on issues. Trump is a case example of a candidate that can be good on some issues (though he was horrible on at least as many other issues), but then when he took office abandoned all his good positions. Because you can’t trust a bullshitter.
