A number of mental health professionals have warned that President Trump is a pathological liar or even delusional, but that may be too harsh. His relationship to reality may be less that of a loon, and more that of a pitchman, a huckster, who long ago learned that droning the same fictional narrative often enough and forcefully enough allowed him to make the sale.
It seems obvious that making the sale is all he cares about, so whether the pitch is true or false is not the question. Only whether it works. He is far from alone in this regard. Steve Jobs was famous for creating a reality distortion field. Everyone in his orbit was expected to inhabit his alternative reality of what was possible. Hitler, too. And televangelists.
The difficulty for those attempting to execute cons on an epic scale is challenges to their fictional forcefield. The spell can be broken by hecklers in the congregation, the guy who notices the Emperor hasn’t got new clothes, he’s naked. Unlike a cult leader, you may not be able to wall yourself off from any dissent, but there is another solution.
The critics can be demeaned, defamed and demonized. Rather than debate them, they can be made into the enemy of “us,” a vile “them” that deserves to be cast into outer darkness. This technique actually increases the solidarity and allegiance of the faithful. Its flaw is that not everyone is willing to believing the words of the huckster instead of the evidence of their lying eyes.
Still, it has worked so far for Trump. He made a show of ejecting protesters from his campaign rallies, and mocking critics and rivals is an integral part of his shtick. That is the major purpose of his incessant tweet, tweet, tweeting. But above all, he brands any reality that conflicts with his imaginary world “fake news.” Or, as he would say, FAKE NEWS.
This kind of adversarial game is old news. Richard Nixon loathed the press, wiretapped reporters, put them on an enemies list, sicced the IRS on several of them, and sent his Vice President out to brand them “a small and unelected elite.” And Nixon himself told his aides, “The press is your enemy. Enemies. Understand that?… They’re trying to stick the knife right in our groin.” Ouch. But clear enough. Us and Them, baby. Which side are you on?
When CBS ran unfavorable news about him, he called up the head of the company to threaten to “bring you to your knees and break your network.” And in response to Watergate, Press Secretary Ron Ziegler was instructed to brand it “a third-rate burglary,” and to accuse “The Washington Post” of “shabby journalism” and “character assassination.”
Nixon had been schooled by Roger Ailes in the art of using television to paint an alternative reality and to bypass the media, to make image more important than substance, emotion more important than logic, and propaganda more important than truth. Ailes went on to create Fox News. It, and a metastatically proliferating glut of cybernews outlets, has made fake news that caters to any mythological belief system available 24/7.
By the time of Reagan, our first entertainment president, the White House was run like show business. There was “a line of the day” so that everyone was constantly on script. Appearances by the president were elaborately stage managed, with sets to match the substance, artfully cast extras, attention to hair, make-up, and costumes, and a script engineered for maximum emotive value.
Ad libbing was minimized since Reagan was a gaffe machine. When he did give press conferences, a gaffe squad soon followed to clean up the messes he made by explaining what the president “really” meant, as when he said school lunches were plenty nutritious since ketchup was a vegetable, or that the biggest source of pollution was trees. Mostly he avoided the press, relied on photo ops and scripted shows, smiled amiably, and pretended he couldn’t hear shouted questions above the rotors of Marine One. And when Reagan was caught in lies about the illegalities of Iran-Contra, his mea culpa was similarly “Aw Shucks.”
“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 evidence tell me it is not.” So, who you gonna trust, the ugly facts or my friendly, old self?
Despite all the tools that entertainment presidents can deploy to cloud men’s minds, however, the press is still a worry. Nobel prize psychologist Daniel Kahneman notes that “people tend to assess the relative importance of issues by the ease with which they are retrieved from memory — and this is largely determined by the extent of coverage in the media… In turn, what the media choose to report corresponds to their view of what is currently on the public’s mind.”
Kahneman also notes that “it is no accident that authoritarian regimes exert substantial pressure on independent media.” The better to force their reports to conform to the party line. Ironically, the knee-jerk response of the press — to report Trump’s every tweet — reinforces his narrative. Kahneman, again, says “repetition induces cognitive ease and a comfortable feeling of familiarity.”
Thus, Trump’s incessant repetition of a few themes serves to make his spin top of mind for many people. The news is Fake. The Russia story is total fabrication. Comey started a witch hunt. I believe Putin. Mueller is corrupt. We are making America great again. And his favorite admonition, “Believe me.”
It is clearly tempting for many people to fall for it. It makes life easier, but a lot more dangerous. All because of what Kahneman describes as the “puzzling limitation of our mind: our confidence in what we believe we know, and our apparent inability to acknowledge the full extent of our ignorance and the uncertainly of the world in which we live.”
But, alas, eternal vigilance is the price of not being conned by a Madoff, a Ponzi, a P.T. Barnum, or a Donald J. Trump. This shouldn’t be news to anyone.