Trump Is Encouraging a Contemptuous Culture

The president’s lies are destroying not just people, but a reference to a shared reality.

“All these lies, whether their authors know it or not, harbor an element of violence,” wrote the philosopher Hannah Arendt in her essay “Truth and Politics,” first published in 1967 in The New Yorker. A person known to the police is suspected of making the letter bombs that were sent on Wednesday to former President Barack Obama, former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, former Attorney General Eric Holder, California Rep. Maxine Waters and former CIA Director and commentator for MSNBC and CNN John Brennan.

It is not clear how many more packages will turn up in the next few days. Similar objects were found on Thursday that had been sent to former Vice President Joe Biden and a restaurant owned by Robert De Niro. If you include entrepreneur and philanthropist George Soros, who was sent a similar pipe bomb in the mail at the start of the week, the targets are a group as diverse as they are unmistakable – what links them is that Donald Trump and right-wing networks see them as opponents and spread falsehoods about them.

The practice of lying consists of different types of saying incorrect things and it is worth spelling them out to illustrate the spectrum of their poisonous effect in the public sphere. There is saying incorrect things about yourself out of vanity: your actions or qualities are amplified, embellished, invented. These are the lies of a boaster. There is saying incorrect things about yourself out of deceit: your story is changed and manipulated in order to mislead. This can happen under circumstances that make it necessary to say incorrect things as the only way of surviving. Or purely out of a desire to deceive, for the benefits that the deception might have. There is lying about other people, which is intended to harm their reputation or devalue them. These are false claims that slander and disparage.

There Is a System to Trump’s Lies

Trump is a master of the whole repertoire of lying. He boasts, he deceives, he manipulates and he slanders. Sometimes it is not even possible to say whether Trump himself believes his lies, whether external reality even exists as a reference for him or whether he thinks what he says needs to be compared with observable, verifiable facts and figures. Or whether nothing else but his own wishes and desires count as objective for this president. The only thing that is certain is that Trump uses lies about real or imagined opponents so systematically that the malicious intent cannot be concealed. The untruths Trump spreads about people he wants to hurt is coupled with pubescent ridicule and full-blown hate.

Superficially, these lies and rabble-rousing primarily hurt the people they hit, the people whose intelligence (Waters) or citizenship (Obama) Trump disputes or those whom he collectively calls “enemies of the people,” such as journalists. They are demonized with lies and resentment, stylized as something inferior or dangerous until they are no longer seen as people who are accorded the same rights and the same respect. The rhetorical attacks dehumanize the others until violence against them (by crazy lone perpetrators or terrorist networks) can be fantasized as harmless. Whoever is identified and arrested as the sender of the letter bombs, whatever the motives of the perpetrators might be, the president has encouraged a contemptuous culture that offers a legitimizing context for such acts.

As Brazen As It Is Consistent

But the lies do more damage in the long term. They destroy the concept of a shared reality. That Trump’s first reaction to the bomb attacks, which also affected CNN, included a renewed attack against the “hostile media” is as brazen as it is consistent. One of the jobs of journalists is to distinguish between truth and lies, knowledge and conjecture, information and conspiracy theories. This may not always work out perfectly. There may always be flaws, mistakes and human error. But without doubt, investigation, the search for sources, for proof, for reasons for an assertion or an argument are among the aspects of journalists’ work which all autocrats especially despise, because they are about a reality beyond their radical subjectivity.

“A noticeable decrease in common sense in any given community and a noticeable increase in superstition and gullibility are therefore almost infallible signs of alienation from the world,” wrote Hannah Arendt in “Vita Activa.”

The Politics of Lies Will Destroy Our Shared Reality

This is the most dangerous thing about this politics of lies: that they seek to destroy not just people, but the reference to a reality shared by everyone. The permanent disinformation undermines public discourse and subverts all the concepts, norms and institutions that connect a society. In this respect it is reasonable that for Trump his potential enemies, as well as the media, include the Secret Service, the FBI and judges, as they all represent a democratic community that belongs to everyone.

There is little that irritates this president more than people who feel an obligation to something suspicious like the truth or the law. He has this in common with other authoritarian regimes around the world: Methods of knowledge production, public organizations that provide information, everything that is dedicated in an independent and free way to the critical understanding of social, political and aesthetic phenomena, everything that eludes the total access of the presidential imagination is demonized. It is this terror, the attack on reason and public spirit, which must be averted.