The Art of the Bullshitter

They’re eating the cats. I’ll build a great wall, and Mexico will pay for it. It was the biggest inauguration crowd ever.

I used to think the proper response to Donald Trump’s bullshit was through the sober, fact-based lens of journalism. But, over the past decade, I’ve changed my mind. I now think that asking journalists to pour the best years of their lives into fact-checking him is as daunting and pointless as asking Siskel & Ebert to review the entire Pornhub back catalog.

Most Trump supporters know it’s fake, and they don’t care. In fact, Trump’s propensity for bullshit is not a political liability, it’s a superpower. 

Let me explain. 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. They’d rather the electorate look elsewhere, but Trump’s bullshit about eating cats forced voters to face a truth his opponents wished to conceal. 

And here’s the magic trick: When Trump does assert something outrageous like the migrants are coming for our pets, he’s basically buying his own convenient bullshit. That’s not quite the same thing as lying. 

The flimflam man

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 pitches, and ad copy delivered with the quiet dignity of a wet T-shirt competition. Trump is a very modern artist: weaving, as he likes to say, a barrage of anecdotes, fake and real statistics, gossip, and memes into a nebulous and suggestive species of patter. To put it the way the maestro 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 have 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, 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 was a slick bullshitter, a genius at spinning stories at the dawn of the cable news era. And let’s not forget that when then-Vice President Richard Nixon wriggled out of a scandal in his famous Checkers speech, he was able to survive because he deflected a serious allegation about industrialists buying his influence by serving up a bunch of bullshit about his dog, Checkers. 

Lying and bullshitting are related, but the differences are important. The late philosopher Harry Frankfurt examined the distinction in his seminal tract: On Bullshit.