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Donald Trump can lay claim to the title of most prodigious liar in the history of the presidency. This challenges commonplace beliefs about the American political system. How could such a deceitful and duplicitous figure win the White House in the first place and then retain the loyalty of so many voters after his endless lies were exposed?
Donald Trump can lay claim to the title of most prodigious liar in the history of the presidency. This challenges commonplace beliefs about the American political system. How could such a deceitful and duplicitous figure win the White House in the first place and then retain the loyalty of so many voters after his endless lies were exposed?
George Edwards, a political scientist at Texas A&M and a retired editor of Presidential Studies Quarterly, stated the case bluntly: “Donald Trump tells more untruths than any previous president.” What’s more, “There is no one that is a close second.”
George Edwards, a political scientist at Texas A&M and a retired editor of Presidential Studies Quarterly, stated the case bluntly: “Donald Trump tells more untruths than any previous president.” What’s more, “There is no one that is a close second.”
Trump’s deceptions have been explored from several vantage points. Let’s take a look at one line of analysis.
Trump’s deceptions have been explored from several vantage points. Let’s take a look at one line of analysis.
In 2008, Kang Lee, a developmental psychologist at the University of Toronto, published “Lying in the Name of the Collective Good” along with three colleagues:
In 2008, Kang Lee, a developmental psychologist at the University of Toronto, published “Lying in the Name of the Collective Good” along with three colleagues:
How does that relate to the willingness of Republican and conservative voters to tolerate Trump’s lies — not just to tolerate them but also to cast votes for him again and again?
How does that relate to the willingness of Republican and conservative voters to tolerate Trump’s lies — not just to tolerate them but also to cast votes for him again and again?
In a 2017 Scientific American article building on Lee’s research, “How the Science of ‘Blue Lies’ May Explain Trump’s Support,” Jeremy Adam Smith argued that Lee’s work
In a 2017 Scientific American article building on Lee’s research, “How the Science of ‘Blue Lies’ May Explain Trump’s Support,” Jeremy Adam Smith argued that Lee’s work
If we see Trump’s lies, Smith continued, “not as failures of character but rather as weapons of war, then we can come to see why his supporters might view him as an effective leader. From this perspective, lying is a feature, not a bug, of Trump’s campaign and presidency.”
If we see Trump’s lies, Smith continued, “not as failures of character but rather as weapons of war, then we can come to see why his supporters might view him as an effective leader. From this perspective, lying is a feature, not a bug, of Trump’s campaign and presidency.”
Lee’s insights provide a partial explanation for the loyalty-to-Trump phenomenon, but gaining an understanding of Trump’s intractable mendacity requires several approaches.
Lee’s insights provide a partial explanation for the loyalty-to-Trump phenomenon, but gaining an understanding of Trump’s intractable mendacity requires several approaches.
The deference, or obeisance, of so many seemingly well-informed Republican leaders and millions of Republican voters to Trump’s palpably false claims — the most egregious and damaging of which is the claim the 2020 election was stolen from him — raises an intriguing question: How can this immense delusion persist when survival pressures would seem to foster growing percentages of men and women capable of making discerning, accurate judgments?
In their March 10 paper, “The Cognitive Foundations of Ideological Orthodoxy: Threat Avoidance, Ingroup Mobilization and Signaling,” Antoine Marie and Michael Bang Petersen, political scientists at Aarhus University in Denmark, posed the question this way:
The authors ask how, in this context, powerful “orthodox mind-sets” emerge, mind-sets that restrict free thinking, armed with a “disproportionate righteousness with which they try to protect cherished narratives.”
Marie and Petersen argued that these mind-sets may derive from three main cognitive foundations:
The prevalence of orthodox mind-sets in some realms of our political system is difficult to comprehend for those who are not caught up in it.
In his June 23 article, “Far Right Pushes a Through-the-Looking-Glass Narrative on Jan. 6,” my Times colleague Robert Draper captured how deeply entrenched conspiracy thinking has become in some quarters.
“A far-right ecosystem of true believers has embraced ‘J6’ as the animating force of their lives,” Draper wrote. For these true believers, along with a faction of House Republicans, “Jan. 6 was an elaborate setup to entrap peaceful Trump supporters, followed by a continuing Biden administration campaign to imprison and torment innocent conservatives.”
Trump, over the past two years, has become “even more extreme, his tone more confrontational, his accounts less tethered to reality,” according to The Washington Post:
Another way to look at the issue of Trump’s deceptions is through his eyes.
In the chapter “Truth” in “The Strange Case of Donald J. Trump: A Psychological Reckoning,” Dan P. McAdams, a professor of psychology at Northwestern, provided an explanation for “why Donald Trump lies more than any other public official in the United States today, and why his supporters, nonetheless, put up with his lies.”
For Trump, McAdams wrote,
Part of Trump’s skill at persuading millions of voters to go along with his prevarications is his ability to tap into the deep-seated anger and resentment among his supporters. Anger, it turns out, encourages deception.
In “Mad and Misleading: Incidental Anger Promotes Deception,” Jeremy A. Yip and Maurice E. Schweitzer of Georgetown and the University of Pennsylvania demonstrated through a series of experiments that
When individuals feel angry, Yip and Schweitzer continued,
“Many people are angry about how they have been left behind in the current economic climate,” Schweitzer told the magazine The Greater Good in 2017. “Trump has tapped into that anger, and he is trusted because he professes to feel angry about the same things.”
Trump, Schweitzer said, “has created a siege-like mentality. Foreign countries are out to get us; the media is out to get him. This is a rallying cry that bonds people together.”
In some cases, lying by autocratic political leaders can be an attempt to weaken norms and institutions that restrict the scope of their actions.
In their 2022 paper, “Authoritarian Leaders Share Conspiracy Theories to Attack Opponents, Promote In-Group Unity, Shift Blame, and Undermine Democratic Institutions,” Zhiying (Bella) Ren, Andrew M. Carton, Eugen Dimant and Schweitzer argued that such leaders use conspiracy theories “to undermine institutions that threaten their power” and “in some cases are even motivated to promote chaos.”
More recent work suggests that the focus on anger as a driving force in supporting populist and authoritarian leaders in the mold of Trump masks a more complex interpretation.
In their paper “Does Anger Drive Populism?” published this month, Omer Ali of Duke, Klaus Desmet of Southern Methodist University and Romain Wacziarg of U.C.L.A. found that “a more complex sense of malaise and gloom, rather than anger per se, drives the rise in populism.”
“The incidence of anger,” they wrote,
While levels of anger, gloom and pessimism correlate with receptivity to populist appeals and to authoritarian candidates, another key factor is what scholars describe as the social identity of both leaders and followers.
In a provocative recent paper, “Examining the Role of Donald Trump and His Supporters in the 2021 Assault on the U.S. Capitol: A Dual-Agency Model of Identity Leadership and Engaged Followership,” S. Alexander Haslam, a professor of social and organizational psychology at the University of Queensland, and 11 colleagues from the United States, Australia and England analyzed the Jan. 6 mob assault and disputed the argument that “leaders are akin to puppet masters who either influence their followers directly or not at all. Equally, followers are seen either as passive and entirely dependent on leaders or as entirely independent of them.”
Instead, the 12 authors contended, a more nuanced analysis “recognizes the agency of both leaders and followers and stresses their mutual influence.” They called this approach “a dual-agency model of identity leadership and engaged followership in which both leaders and followers are understood to have influence over each other without being totally constrained by the other.”
The authors described a phenomenon in which Trump and his most ardent followers engage:
In the process, Trump’s supporters lose their connection to real-world rules and morality:
This willingness to take extreme action grows out of a duality in the way people experience their identities:
Social identities, they wrote, “are every bit as real and important to people as personal identities,” but
Social identities become increasingly salient, and potentially more destructive, in times of intense partisan hostility and affective polarization, accentuating a climate of “us against them” and the demonization of the opposition.
“In order for identity leadership to be effective,” the authors wrote,
The authors then quoted Trump speaking at his Jan. 6 rally on the Ellipse shortly before the assault on the Capitol:
At the same time, Trump portrayed his adversaries as the epitome of evil: “Trump reminded them not only of the good work they were doing to fight ‘bad’ actors and forces, but also of the challenges that this ‘dirty business’ presented.”
Again, Haslam and his co-authors quoted Trump speaking at his Jan. 6 rally:
Critically, the 12 scholars wrote, Trump “did not provide them with explicit instructions as to what to do,” noting that “he didn’t tell anyone to storm the barricades, to invade the speaker’s office or to assault police and security guards.” Instead, he “invoked values of strength, determination and a willingness to fight for justice (using the word “fight” 20 times) without indicating who they should fight or how,” setting a goal for his followers “to ensure that the election results were not certified and thereby to ‘stop the steal’ without specifying how that goal should be achieved.”
For Trump supporters, they continued,
Leaders gain influence, Haslam and his collaborators argued,
In the case of Jan. 6, 2021, they wrote:
In conclusion, they argued:
The power of Trump’s speech, they contended,
On Jan. 7, 2021, a full 30 hours after the assault on the Capitol began, Trump condemned the assault in videotaped remarks. “I would like to begin by addressing the heinous attack on the United States Capitol. Like all Americans, I am outraged by the violence, lawlessness and mayhem,” he said. He added, “To those who engage in the acts of violence and destruction, you do not represent our country. And to those who broke the law, you will pay.”
During a CNN town hall in May, however, Trump called Jan. 6 “a beautiful day” and declared that he was “inclined to pardon” many of the rioters.
In a January paper, “Public Opinion Roots of Election Denialism,” Charles Stewart III, a professor of political science at M.I.T., argued that Trump has unleashed profoundly antidemocratic forces within not only Republican ranks but also among a segment of independent voters:
Stewart continues:
It remains unknown whether Trump will be charged in connection with his refusal to abide by all of the legal requirements of democratic electoral competition. Even so, no indictment could capture the enormity of the damage Trump has inflicted on the American body politic with his bad faith, grifting and fundamentally amoral character.
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