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- [00:02]
Eli Lake
This.
- [00:02]
Donald Trump
Hi, It's Vince with ShamWow.
- [00:04]
Eli Lake
You'll be saying, wow, every time you.
- [00:05]
Donald Trump
Use this towel, it's bullshit.
- [00:07]
Eli Lake
It's like a shammy.
- [00:08]
Donald Trump
It's like a towel.
- [00:08]
Eli Lake
It's like a sponge.
- [00:10]
Hulk Hogan
I am the cream.
- [00:12]
Eli Lake
Yeah. This is also bullshit.
- [00:15]
Hulk Hogan
And there is no one that does it better than the macho Man, Randy Savage.
- [00:21]
Eli Lake
And this is bullshit.
- [00:22]
Donald Trump
And the Wall just got 10ft taller, believe me.
- [00:27]
Eli Lake
And here's some more pure, cut, authentic grade American bullshit.
- [00:33]
Donald Trump
In Springfield, they're eating the dogs, the people that came in, they're eating the cats, they're eating. They're eating the pets of the people that live there.
- [00:45]
Eli Lake
I used to think the proper response to Donald Trump's bullshit was through the sober fact based lens of journalism.
- [00:52]
Daniel Dale
And our fact checker Daniel Dale joins us now. So, Daniel, what stands out to you?
- [00:58]
Eli Lake
What stood out was the staggering number of false claims from former President Trump on first count. Aaron? I counted at least 30. 30 false. But over the past decade, I've changed my mind. I now think that asking reporters to pour the best years of their lives into fact checking this blather is as daunting and pointless as asking Siskel and Ebert to review the entire pornhub back catalog. Most Trump supporters know it's fake, and they don't mind that waving a sheet of well researched rebuttals at MAGA fans is like asking the audience at WrestleMania if they know the fights are fixed. Of course they do. That's the appeal. Donald Trump's fans like a cracking tale. And in this respect, Donald Trump's propensity for bullshit is not a political liability, it's a superpower. 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. Frankly, they'd rather the electorate look elsewhere. But Trump's bullshit forced voters to look at a truth his opponents wish to conceal. And here's the magic trick. When Trump does assert something outrageous like the migrants are coming for our pets, he gets away with it. Here in Springfield, I talk to a number of people who say despite the city denying it, they believe the story. It's because he presents as a man with no fact checking filter, someone happily buying his own convenient bullshit. And that's not quite the same thing as lying. 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 pitch, an ad copy delivered with the quiet dignity of a wet T shirt competition. Donald Trump is a very modern artist, weaving, as he likes to say, a barrage of anecdotes, fake and real, statistic gossip and memes into a nebulous and suggestive species of patter. To put it the way the master 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've 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, Donald 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, or Slick Willie as he was known, was a slick bullshitter, perfect for spitting stories at the time of the cable news era. Americans have historically hated liars like Richard Nixon, but they do have a soft spot for the bullshitter. And while lying and bullshit are related, the differences are important. The late philosopher Harry Frankfurt examined this distinction between the liar and the bullshitter in his seminal tract. It was called On Bullshit.
- [04:28]
Harry Frankfurt
A 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, can go anywhere he likes. 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 the specific place in the system of beliefs a false belief for a true one. Whereas a bullshitter, as I say, can go anywhere he likes and draw any kind of picture, any kind of panorama of beliefs that serves his purpose.
- [05:03]
Eli Lake
Doesn't Professor Frankfurt sum up the artistry of Donald Trump? He makes vague, provocative statements that are not really true or false.
- [05:11]
Donald Trump
We're going to build a wall. It's going to be a great wall, and it's going to have big, beautiful doors in it, because we're going to have people coming into our country, but they're going to come into our country legally. We're going to start winning again. We're going to win so much that you're going to get sick and Tired of winning. You're going to say, Mr. President, you're going to send the congressman to see.
- [05:34]
Eli Lake
Trump is painting a picture with his words of a reality he would like us to see. He's not conveying the world as it really is.
- [05:42]
Penn Jillette
Donald Trump really does, in a very pure way, demonstrate the difference between a lie and bullshit.
- [05:52]
Eli Lake
This is magician and professional exposer of bullshit, Penn Jillette of the duo Penn and Teller.
- [05:58]
Penn Jillette
A lie is very respectful of the truth, and that is denying it. And bullshit is saying anything that pops into your head, and that is very, very good in art and very, very bad in science and politics.
- [06:18]
Eli Lake
Now, 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 the pungent brown stuff. It pervades everything from our economy to our culture. Bullshit is dangerous when it comes to science, but in politics, bullshit may be unsavory, but it is sadly essential. From the Free Press, this is honestly. I'm Eli Lake. The story of how Donald Trump became the greatest bullshitter in American history.
- [07:03]
George Carlin
You know, 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. High quality bullshit, world class designer bullshit, to be sure. Hospital tested, clinically proven bullshit, but bullshit nonetheless. And it always amuses me that so many people.
- [07:31]
Eli Lake
That was the late, great comic George Carlin talking about advertising. Advertising is central to American life. It defines everything from the messages our politicians serve us in election times to the videos your Instagram algorithm delivers and everything in between. In this country, the persuasion industry is always booming.
- [07:52]
George Carlin
So what do you do, Don?
- [07:54]
Eli Lake
I blow up bridges. Don's in advertising.
- [07:58]
George Carlin
No Madison Avenue. What a gas.
- [08:02]
Eli Lake
We all have to serve somebody.
- [08:06]
George Carlin
Perpetuating lie. How do you sleep at night?
- [08:09]
Penn Jillette
A bed made of money.
- [08:12]
Eli Lake
Isn't this an education?
- [08:14]
George Carlin
You hucksters in your tower created religion of mass consumption.
- [08:19]
Penn Jillette
People want to be told what to do so badly that they'll listen to anyone.
- [08:24]
George Carlin
When you say people.
- [08:25]
Eli Lake
That was, of course, a clip from Mad Men. It's one of my favorite scenes. Don Draper is at a little Greenwich Village coffee house with his paramour and one of her beatnik friends. Now, we've all heard that critique before. The culture of mass consumption is evil. And advertisers persuade us to live our lives always wanting the next new thing. Advertising is an industry, as Carlin tells us, that runs entirely on bullshit.
- [08:51]
Donald Trump
I've been driving a Lincoln since long before anybody paid me to drive one. I didn't do it to be cool. I didn't do it to make a statement. I just liked it.
- [09:05]
Eli Lake
Bullshit has been around forever, but a particularly American variant has its roots in the 19th century, which was a paradise for bullshit artists. In this young America, there was a hunger for spectacle. Traveling medicine shows promising miracle cures were almost indistinguishable from the carnivals themselves, as if both science and entertainment were performances requiring a suspension of disbelief. On July 5, 1810, in Bethel, Connecticut, a man was born who would take bullshit up a notch. His parents named him Phineas, and 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. She was an African American called Joyce Heath. She was blind and nearly entirely paralyzed. Barnum used her as a human curiosity, claiming that she was the 161-year-old nanny of George Washington. After she died, he even organized a public autopsy and sold tickets to people keen to see her dissected. Of course, this pointless autopsy proved that Joyce was not over 150 years old, an impossibility. We all know it was all a gruesome form of bullshit, one happily celebrated in the 1986 made for television movie with Burt Lancaster.
- [10:23]
Bill Clinton
My friends, I maintain to my death that I truly believe Joyce to be what I represented. And if you are uncharitable enough to believe otherwise, well, this is a free country.
- [10:34]
Eli Lake
Like Trump, Barnum professed to believe his own bullshit. The cliche a sucker's born every minute is attributed to Barnum, But I suspect that much of Barnum's audience were not suckers. Most of them, I think, knew they were not actually seeing real mermaids or midget kings from faraway lands. They just wanted to see what all the hype was about. They wanted a good show. It's like people who attend magic shows. They know it's not real. At least most of them do. They're in on the con.
- [11:03]
Penn Jillette
When you saw a woman in half on stage, everybody except young children who wouldn't be there and people who are dangerously mentally ill. Do not believe that you've killed a human being.
- [11:14]
Eli Lake
This is Penn Jillette again.
- [11:16]
Penn Jillette
But magic then slides over into other stuff. Like, I can read body language when you've actually just forced a card. I can use psychology, many magicians, and I'm not in any way saying something that I wouldn't say if David Blaine were here on the call with us. David Blaine believes that you're supposed to leave people believing things that aren't true. He believes that's the job of the magician.
- [11:44]
Eli Lake
Now, 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 the performers themselves and the audience to pretend that the show is real. When wrestling first became a big thing in the 1980s and 1990s, the time of Andre the Giant and Hulk Hogan, newspaper journalist would occasionally run stories trying to out the sport as being faked or scripted. This, they thought, was a killer scoop, a death knell to phony sport built on lies. But it wasn't. Wrestling fans didn't care it was fake. They were invested in the characters, the storylines and the spectacle, not the authenticity.
- [12:32]
Hulk Hogan
When I look out there and I see Donald Trump, I think about how his business was compromised. But what happened last week when they took a shot at my hero.
- [12:49]
Penn Jillette
And.
- [12:50]
Hulk Hogan
They tried to kill the next President of the United States? Enough was enough. And I said, let trumpamania run wild, brother. Let trumpamania rule again. Let trumpamania make America great again.
- [13:11]
Eli Lake
That was Terry Bollea, better known as Hulk Hogan, probably wrestling's most iconic champion. He was what wrestling fans would know as the face, a good guy who would fight staged contests against the heels or the bad guys.
- [13:26]
Hulk Hogan
Hulkamania is going to live forever. And if Andre the Giant physically destroyed me, physically wiped me out, physically took the belts, maybe the little Hulksters wouldn't believe that. You gotta play it straight, that you gotta keep your head high, man.
- [13:40]
Eli Lake
He was given a primetime slot on the closing and most important night of the Republican convention.
- [13:45]
Donald Trump
And how about the Hulkster? How good was he? Is he?
- [13:48]
Eli Lake
And the crowd lapped it up.
- [13:49]
Donald Trump
Where is he? Boy, oh boy. You know, they may call it, they may call that entertainment. I know about entertainment. But when he used to lift a 350 pound man over his shoulders and then bench press him two rows into the audience, I say maybe entertainment. But he is one strong son of a gun. I'm going to tell you, I watched it many times. There aren't a lot of entertainers that could do that, right?
- [14:25]
Eli Lake
Game recognized. Game.
- [14:27]
Donald Trump
You were fantastic. Thank you very much.
- [14:30]
Eli Lake
From one bullshitter to another, Trump gets it.
- [14:32]
Matt Taibbi
I didn't get into wrestling at all until I followed Trump.
- [14:36]
Eli Lake
This is journalist and author Matt Taibbi.
- [14:39]
Matt Taibbi
I had never paid any attention to it and it wasn't until a couple of months into the race that somebody I knew, had a friend who was in wrestling, was telling me all about how Trump was playing the heel routine, right? Like, if you. If you understand the basic framework of wrestling is the heel versus the face. And the heel's job is to get everybody upset. That's what brings in the gate. The heel says horrible, vile things.
- [15:07]
Hulk Hogan
Triple H, did you just tell the Rock, don't do anything stupid what he said? This coming from a man who took a sacred vow of marriage to the biggest slut in the Western Hemisphere.
- [15:21]
Donald Trump
It didn't happen. And she would not have been the chosen one. She would not have been the chosen one.
- [15:29]
Eli Lake
Now, this tradition of stretching the truth is a big part of our national politics. And even though there are polls going back decades that say voters seek authenticity in their representatives and candidates, deep down, I think they also expect a baseline of bullshit. At least that's what George Carlin thinks.
- [15:47]
George Carlin
And 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. That's why they re elected Clinton. Listen, Clinton might be full of shit, but he lets you know it. Dole tried to hide it. I'm an honest man. Bullshit. Bullshit. People don't believe that shit. Clinton said, hi, I'm full of shit. And how do you like that? And the people said, at least he's honest.
- [16:41]
Eli Lake
Now, we could list other presidents here, trafficked in Buncombe, but Clinton is a great example of a master bullshitter who preceded Trump the Magic Johnson to his Michael Jordan, if you will. There are many examples, but the best one is Clinton's lawyerly parsing in the Monica Lewinsky affair. Here's how it started.
- [17:00]
Bill Clinton
But I want to say one thing to the American people.
- [17:03]
Eli Lake
I want you to listen to me.
- [17:04]
Bill Clinton
I'm going to say this again. I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Ms. Lewinsky.
- [17:13]
Eli Lake
And here's how it ended up.
- [17:16]
Harry Frankfurt
No sex of any kind, in any manner, shape or form of President Clinton was an utterly false statement. Is that correct?
- [17:28]
Eli Lake
It depends upon what the meaning of.
- [17:30]
Bill Clinton
The word is, yes.
- [17:35]
Eli Lake
What Bill is saying here is I did not technically lie. He's wriggling out by claiming that whatever he did with Monica Lewinsky did not entirely meet his definition of sex. Now, this defense is pure bullshit. But it worked. Clinton's approval ratings recovered after his scandal and impeachment because Americans hate a liar, but they do tolerate it. Bullshitter and Clinton is not the only one. Ronald Reagan loved to spin tales. He once told Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir that he was part of a film crew that captured the liberation of a concentration camp was bullshit. The classic example of Reagan's bullshitting comes from 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. Here's how it started that the United.
- [18:30]
Bill Clinton
States undercut its allies and secretly violated American policy against trafficking with terrorists. Those charges are utterly false, and here's.
- [18:40]
Eli Lake
How it ended up let's start with.
- [18:41]
Bill Clinton
The part that is the most controversial. A few months ago, I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages. My heart and my best intentions still tell me that's true, but the facts and the evidence tell me it is not so.
- [18:57]
Eli Lake
In a sense, Trump is standing on the shoulders of the great bullshitters before him.
- [19:03]
Bill Clinton
For those who've abandoned hope, we'll restore hope and we'll welcome them into a great national crusade to make America great again.
- [19:12]
Eli Lake
The Making of the Bullshitter Goat after the break 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 20th century. Peale was the man who wrote the bestseller the Power of Positive Thinking, a book that popularized the idea that in order to accomplish one's goals, you basically just have to imagine it really, really hard. Which, while not being necessarily bad advice, is also basically a bunch of bullshit. When Trump was married to his first wife, Ivana Marie Zelnikova, in April 1977, it was Peel who presided over the nuptials. Throughout his life, when he faced bankruptcy, humiliation and prison, Trump turned to positive thinking to blot out bad news he could not accept.
- [20:04]
Donald Trump
Greetings everyone. I am Donald J. Trump and I welcome you to this fantastic audiobook version of my book, the Art of the deal, published in 1987.
- [20:15]
Eli Lake
And Trump's famous book 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 everywhere on television.
- [20:56]
Donald Trump
Do you really think this is the right thing for us to be doing?
- [20:58]
Eli Lake
Ivana, what will people think?
- [21:00]
Donald Trump
Let them talk.
- [21:02]
Eli Lake
Tano.
- [21:03]
Donald Trump
Ivana. Ivana.
- [21:04]
Eli Lake
Vada, vada, vada.
- [21:05]
Donald Trump
It's wrong, isn't it?
- [21:06]
Eli Lake
But it feels so right.
- [21:08]
Donald Trump
Then it's a deal?
- [21:09]
Eli Lake
Yes. We eat our pizza the wrong way. Crust first in movies. Excuse me, where's the lobby?
- [21:16]
Donald Trump
Down the hall and to the left.
- [21:18]
Eli Lake
Thanks. Trump understood celebrity as a kind of currency valuable for a man who had dreamed of political power. And by the late 1990s, Trump explored a presidential run. For the first time.
- [21:30]
Bill Clinton
You have a vice presidential candidate in mind.
- [21:33]
Donald Trump
Well, I really haven't gotten quite there yet.
- [21:36]
Eli Lake
Oprah.
- [21:37]
Donald Trump
I love Oprah. Oprah would always be my first choice. Oprah.
- [21:41]
Eli Lake
Even though he was a big supporter of Bill Clinton, he had made a brief bid for the nomination of Ross Perot's reform party. In 2004, Trump Hotels and casinos went bankrupt. But that same year, he found a lifeline. It was called the Apprentice.
- [22:05]
Penn Jillette
NPC took a loser, a well known loser, a dipshit, and created a Persona of a successful businessman to make an interesting show. Now, if you had gotten an actually good businessman for that role, the show.
- [22:22]
Eli Lake
Would have been unwatchable again. This is Penn Jillette, who appeared on Celebrity Apprentice with Trump getting fired by the future President of the United States.
- [22:31]
Penn Jillette
I mean, I'm telling this story from my point of view because it's the only one I have, so please forgive me, but when I was fired, which incidentally, we weren't fired because Donald Trump did not have a job to give us because the casinos that Donald Trump could have employed me in, he went bankrupt. And if you can go bankrupt at a casino where people give you motherfucking money, how good a businessman are you?
- [23:02]
Eli Lake
As Trump's star rose with the Apprentice, he continued to test the waters of presidential politics. In 2011, he tapped into something potent in just a few short weeks. Donald Trump's stance on where President Obama.
- [23:16]
Donald Trump
Was born has, well evolved from this. The reason I have a little doubt, just a little, just a little, is because he grew up and nobody knew. To this, I want him to show his birth certificate. To this, I'm saying it's a real possibility, much greater than I thought two or three weeks ago, than he has pulled one of the great cons in the history of politics.
- [23:38]
Eli Lake
Wow. That is bullshit. At one point, Trump even claimed that he had sent researchers to Hawaii to investigate the matter. In an interview with the Daily Caller, he he said they couldn't believe what they're finding. Notice, though, that Trump never comes out and accuses Obama of being born in Kenya, as other less skilled demagogues would. He doesn't make the mistake of a senator, Joe McCarthy, who claimed to have an actual list of names of communist spies in the army, which he of course made up and was exposed for making up. No, Trump was just asking questions and expressing doubt. And the controversy he stoked repositioned Trump as a central character in American politics. In the 2000 and tens, 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 citizen was a bridge too far even for other populists in the Republican Party, like Sarah Palin, at least at first. 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 White House correspondents dinner in 2011. Donald Trump is here tonight.
- [25:00]
Barack Obama
Now, 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?
- [25:32]
Eli Lake
After Obama roasted him in a room full of journalists and politicians, Donald Trump privately seized and plotted his revenge. He finally got serious about running for president. What we are listening to now is the walk on music for Trump as he descended down the escalator at Trump Tower on June 16, 2015 to announce his bid for the presidency. It is a Neil Young song about a failed America.
- [26:03]
Donald Trump
That is some group of people, Thousands. So nice. Thank you very much. That's really nice. Thank you. It's great to be at Trump Tower. It's great.
- [26:13]
Eli Lake
And that is how Trump began his campaign for 2016. The first words out of his mouth were, in fact, bullshit. There were not thousands of people at Trump Tower on that early summer day. You can tell because his lines that would later in the campaign prompt rapturous applause are met with silence.
- [26:32]
Donald Trump
When Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best, they're not sending you, they're not sending you. They're sending people that have lots of problems, and they're bringing those problems with us. They're bringing drugs, they're bringing crime, they're rapists. And some, I assume, are good people. But I speak.
- [26:55]
Eli Lake
We all know what happened that year. 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 Trump. And the Clintons were plutocrats who went to the same galas. They were part of the same world until Donald Trump came down the escalator in 2015. And then all bets were off. The election was vicious on both sides. Trump's crowds would chant, lock her up. Trump showed up at his second debate with Hillary with an entourage of women who had accused Bill of sexual assault. Hillary, to her credit, threw everything but the kitchen sink at her opponent. But it's worth lingering for a moment on her most enduring line of attack.
- [27:46]
Donald Trump
Look, from everything I see, has no respect for this person.
- [27:53]
Daniel Dale
Well, that's because he'd rather have a puppet as President of the United States. It's pretty clear you're the puppet. It's pretty clear you won't admit that the Russians have engaged in cyber attacks against the United States of America that you encouraged espionage against.
- [28:09]
Eli Lake
Now, remember, Americans hate a liar, but they tolerate a bullshitter. And in this respect, Hillary Clinton is not like her husband or Trump. On Twitter during the campaign, for example, Clinton touted an exclusive story from Yahoo's Michael Isikoff that reported an ongoing FBI investigation into the Trump campaign. What Hillary Clinton did not post on Twitter was that that story was generated through opposition research that her own campaign had purchased. That opposition research, collected by contractors working for a former British sport 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.
- [28:57]
Donald Trump
For the first time, US Investigators say that they have corroborated some of the communications detailed in a 35 page dossier compiled by a former British intelligence agent.
- [29:07]
Daniel Dale
So I know that he knows that this wasn't on the level. I don't know that we'll 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. So of course he's obsessed with me and I believe that it's a guilty conscience in so much as he has a conscience.
- [29:26]
Eli Lake
Here is Hillary Clinton herself in 2019, affirming the bullshit that her own campaign originally paid for. The amazing thing about it is that she said this two months after the special counsel's investigation into what was known as Russiagate found no evidence that Trump or any other American had conspired with Russia to influence the 2016 election. What began as a dossier of bullshit had flowered into a full blown lie in a few short years.
- [29:54]
Matt Taibbi
I think that was a huge mistake because if you're going to accuse Trump of anything, you can't accuse him of being completely un American and a spy, because the two things that are most conspicuous about him is that we've seen this person every day of our lives, you know, since we were born.
- [30:13]
Eli Lake
This, again, is Matt Taibi.
- [30:14]
Matt Taibbi
It was just a bad lie to tell. And that's the thing. Like, Trump is a bullshit artist, but he's a good one. The thing that he's selling for people is something they want to believe. They, you know, this whole, we're going to make America great again, we're going to do all these amazing things, we're going to lead the world. Like that resonates with people. When you point to Donald Trump and say, this guy's a Russian agent, it just didn't. It didn't click.
- [30:37]
Eli Lake
Trump's bullshit reached a zenith when he lost the 2020 election on January 6. His superpower to believe his own bullshit had real consequences. We need to open the doors of the Capitol, and here it's worth explaining that bullshit in and of itself can be true or false. Trump's tantrum and inability to accept his defeat was a sinister kind of bullshit that millions of Americans cannot forgive or forget. The Capitol riot was a humiliating event for America. Many people, including the people around Trump, like Vice President Mike Pence, genuinely believed the whole system hung in the balance. And in many ways, it did. Any claim that the election was rigged was untrue. But many of Trump's 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 Mike Pence and Attorney General Bill Barr, disobeyed their Commander in chief and refused to believe his own bullshit. And after that, it would be easy to write Trump off. Presumably, his bullshit had damaged him irreparably. But that wasn't the case. Trump's supporters, the Republican Party, and perhaps even the majority of the electorate all eventually forgave him. They forgave him because as disgraceful as January 6th was, the alternative to Trump was a Party that weaponized the justice system against him, that used the government's power and influence to censor critics on social media, all while declaring their fidelity to the Constitution and democracy that rankled people. They forgave Trump's sinister bullshit because his opponents put forward a kind of lie that violating democratic norms actually preserved them. And those opponents, particularly in the Democratic Party, keep getting Trump wrong.
- [32:44]
Daniel Dale
You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump's supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right?
- [32:59]
George Carlin
Too much of what's happening in our country today is not normal. Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic.
- [33:13]
Eli Lake
Do you think Donald Trump is a fascist? Yes, I do. Yes, I do. But Donald Trump is not unprecedented. He's not an alien force or an infection of the body politic. He is a mirror. He reflects an America that runs on bullshit that has become ignored to bullshit, that has come to expect bullshit from their leaders. So when our elites insist that we've never seen anyone like Trump, they come off as liars. And they also fail to grasp sometimes even a bullshitter tells the truth. And the moderator said, well, Mr. Trump, if in fact the system is rigged, as you suggest, what would be your evidence? Remember what he said, bro. The comedian Dave Chappelle captured this best in 2022 in a monologue on Saturday Night Live. He said, I know the system is rigged because I use it. I said, God damn. I don't know if Trump will win the 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, many Americans feel the system is rigged. Will Trump be able to solve these problems? Probably not. He never built the wall he promised, but he also never had Hillary Clinton arrested. So when he threatens to deport 11 million illegal immigrants or impose a false peace on Ukraine, or prosecute what he has called the enemy within, I think.
- [35:06]
Donald Trump
The bigger problem are the people from within. We have some very bad people. We have some sick people, radical left.
- [35:12]
Eli Lake
Lunatics, it's more likely than not that he's bullshitting. It's something that his enraged opposition might keep in mind. Trump does not really threaten the deep state, the media or the Democrats. The last time he was in power, these constituencies made amend posing as his resistance. Rather, the people most harmed by Trump is 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. Thanks for listening. I'm Eli Lake. If you liked this episode, if you learned something, if you disagreed with something, or if it simply sparked a new understanding of our present moment, please share it with your friends and families and use it to have a conversation of your own. And if you want to support honestly, there's only one way to do it. Go to the Free press@the FP.com and become a subscriber today. See you next time.