Reclaiming the Big House: Trump, Lying, Racism, and Power
Donald Trump has been lying a lot lately. The primary target of his mendacity these past several days has been the self-styled “Squad,” the four first-term congresswomen of color who have been vocal in their opposition to his actions and statements as president, and in their belief that he should be impeached. And he has continued to lie about whatever else has flitted past the speech centers of his brain in the given moment. During the “rally” he held in North Carolina last Wednesday, for example, he made demonstrably false assertions about unemployment numbers and the strength of the economy, told a very partial truth about GOP “bargain health insurance plans,” and outright lied about coverage for pre-existing conditions. All that in addition to making “several false explosive claims” about freshman Minnesota Rep and “Squad” member Ilhan Omar, which prompted the chilling (and allegedly choreographed) “send her back” chant that has remained a top news story since.
That Trump continues to lie constantly is hardly news. Indeed, fact-checking POTUS in real time is now an accepted MSM strategy for countering the blizzard of misinformation, distortion, and malicious absurdity that has become — to put it charitably — a signature element of his political brand. Tracking the nature and sheer volume of his lies has become the full-time job of Toronto Star journalist Daniel Dale. If Trump were Pinocchio, I’m not sure there would be enough trees on the planet to keep up with the growth rate of his nose.
Why Trump lies constantly has been explained in terms of or considered in the context of several things. It has been attributed to his virulent narcissism, or more general mental unwellness (columnist Andrew Sullivan has been a vocal proponent of this view). It has been assessed in relation to his charlatanism: how the lies function as a diversion from the criminality and sleaze surrounding the 2016 election, his gross abuse of the emoluments clause, his various personal scandals, and his promotion of economic policies favorable to him and (other) 1%’ers at the expense of most Americans, including many of his followers; how the hermetic Fox News-Breitbart “media ecosystem” is ripe for exploitation by someone like him. It has been analyzed as a function of his autocratic tendencies: how the erosion of faith in the ability to distinguish true from false — “truth decay” — plays into the hands of political actors willing to fill the void with their own version of what’s real.
This latter feature is key, I think, for it focuses our attention on the relationship between lying and power. In everyday life, we often lie to avoid punishment or some other form of reprisal, understanding or at least believing that the person or people we’re lying to have the power to punish us. Trump the charlatan, as noted, frequently lies to divert attention from those things that make him vulnerable. (Wednesday’s Untruthfest was scheduled to coincide with the original date of Robert Mueller’s testimony before the House of Representatives.) But lying can also itself be an exercise of power. Sullivan begins his June 14 column for New York Magazine, “Donald Trump and the Art of the Lie,” with such an instance from an interview Trump did with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos: “I like the truth. I’m actually a very honest guy.” “It was,” Sullivan says, “a particularly Trumpish kind of lie,…so staggeringly, self-evidently untrue, and so confidently, breezily said, it was less a statement of nonfact than an expression of pure power.” As if illustrating in miniature the veracity of his infamous January 2016 assertion that he “wouldn’t lose any voters” if he shot someone on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue, he tells lies like this one all the time in the first place to remind everyone that he can and will likely continue to get away with them.
Trump as a powerful man has of course long been part of his brand — viz. “You’re fired!” and all the tawdry bling. Assessments of the deep-seated insecurity they may or may not evidence aside, his repeated assertions of his power were vital to his success in selling his candidacy to just enough voters to eek out a win in the 2016 election. His trumped-up assertions of his success as a businessman and even his pussy-grabbing remark were appealing (or at least not damning) because they put some oomph behind his campaign promises. A man like this, evangelicals could rest assured, would indeed tilt the federal judiciary in their favor if they would look past his personal foibles and pull the lever for him. A man like this, disaffected working class whites could have faith, would have the kahunas to shake things up in D.C. if they would entrust the nation to him.
The opioid that smoothed the edges of these brutally transactional pacts, however, was the fantasy that his assertions of power appealed to, and more central to that fantasy than his sexism, celebrity, or supposed business acumen was his racism. The fact that Trump emerged as a political figure based on the pernicious racist lie of birtherism, or that the centerpiece of his 2015 announcement of his candidacy was his racist slurs against Mexican immigrants, was no accident. Race, Ta-Nehisi Coates argued two years ago, is why he was elected. Trump’s “genius,” Coates observed, was to recognize how strong the “hunger for revanche” was among a sizable portion of the white electorate, and to appeal to them by “mov[ing] racism from the euphemistic and plausibly deniable to the overt and freely claimed.” Proclamations of a post-racial America notwithstanding, Trump saw that like him, a lot of white voters hated the mere fact of a black man in the White House, and he let them know unambiguously that he was with them. And since being elected, he “has made the negation of Obama’s legacy the foundation of his own.” All this, Coates said, makes Trump “truly…something new — the first president whose entire political existence hinges on the fact of a black president.” As such, he asserted provocatively, Trump “must be called by his rightful honorific — America’s first white president.”
One appeal of white supremacy, as Coates reminded readers, is the way it seems to bind all who benefit from it. He provided as one formulation of this belief an 1848 statement by South Carolina Senator and two-term VP John C. Calhoun: all whites, “the poor as well as the rich, belong to the upper class, and are respected and treated as equals.” Underlying this fantasy of societal cohesion is one of power. The math of it isn’t hard: in our democracy with its ideals of consensus and civil discourse, and its legal brakes on excessive exercises of individual liberty, the institution of slavery enabled white individuals to exercise something close to absolute power over others. Slave owners could demand sexual favors from — rape — their slaves if they had a mind to. They could punish their slaves arbitrarily and cruelly, to the point of killing them, for any or no reason.
Trump has openly enacted both aspects of this power dynamic, presenting himself as an unapologetic sexual predator (albeit against white women in the main) and overseeing the human rights catastrophe on the southern border. In this respect, both his candidacy and his presidency have in varying degrees embodied the white supremacist fantasy of a return (“revanche”) to pre-Civil War America. Trump the Grand Wizard is reclaiming 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue as the Big House and the nation as the White Man’s plantation, and as Coates so forcefully described, he’s attempting to erase the legacy of 44, as if the Obamas were uppity Reconstruction-era “Negroes” whose stain had to be flushed out of the White House. Even the chaotic nature of Trump’s presidency bears this out, I think: while in the main a product of his gross incompetence, the chaos also suggests that his primary model of autocracy isn’t the ruthlessly ordered 20th century fascist state but the 19th century plantation, a family-centered enterprise in which the Master’s every whim, once given expression, was law.
This power of the Master’s word, moreover, provides the context in which Trump’s pathological mendacity becomes not merely the excrescence of a damaged psyche, but a corollary of the logic of MAGA. Since in the white supremacist MAGA fantasy the country belongs to them, white people are free to say whatever the hell they want to about it, in the same way that they were supposedly free once upon a time to do whatever the hell they wanted to with their slaves, who were also their property. And in the same way that the sexual favors they forced from and the punishments they meted out to their slaves were justified by the mere fact that they were white and wanted them, so too is whatever they say “true,” however prima facie cruel or absurd it might be, simply because it’s they, white people, who are saying it. Fiat lux (Genesis 1:3). Fiat ___ (White Master, 1700s-1800s/2015-?).
How broadly this fantasy will continue to appeal to the electorate is an open question. What happens when it begins to chafe too insistently against the demonstrably real? For how long can Trump keep his less affluent followers in a frenzy of inchoate rage? How deep is the well of their resentment? At what point will the sting of losing their health insurance, should the DOJ lawsuit against the ACA succeed in the federal courts, or their job, should Trump’s stupid tariff wars start to tank the economy, break through? How many revelations about his dirty dealings will they be willing to look past, especially those that shine a light on the way he has enriched himself, his family, and his cronies at their expense? If their embrace of him is at its heart a transactional one, at what point will the deal begin to sour?
One thing is certain: Trump’s mendacity will continue. It has long since become clear that he’s incapable of doing otherwise. Liars gonna lie. If he’s to be opposed successfully, then, he must be forced as much as possible into CYA diversions, which will entail pressing him relentlessly on the many areas where he’s vulnerable — and endeavoring not to be diverted. A liar on the run is a far more manageable foe than a liar flouting his lies before his followers and enablers.
Easy to say.
