Lies or Delusions?

 

Lies or Delusions?

On Wednesday evening May 10, 2023, CNN made the inexcusable journalistic error of letting Donald Trump broadcast his usual string of falsehoods to a national television audience. I won’t go into the specifics of all his lies. After all, I’m 76 years old. I may not have enough time left on earth to cover them all. His falsehoods on CNN fall into at least three categories: His claim that he won the 2020 presidential election, that nothing wrong happened in Washington, DC, on January 6, 2021, and that any legal proceeding that finds against him in any way is a political “witch hunt” not legitimate jurisprudence. We’ve heard all of these falsehoods before. Trump’s deluded supporters believe him, a fact that is simply beyond comprehension. That they do makes his falsehoods not just untrue but politically extremely dangerous. Still, he repeats them every chance he gets.

We’ve known for years that Trump cannot open his mouth without spewing falsehoods. Almost everything Trump says is false, but I think we have to ask: Are his falsehoods lies? To answer that question we need to know what the word “lie” means. Dictionary.com defines it as “a false statement made with deliberate intent to deceive; an intentional untruth.” For a statement to be a lie and not merely a falsehood then, the person speaking it must know that the statement is untrue, and they must have an intent to deceive those who hear the statement. Saying something that isn’t true isn’t necessarily a lie. It may just be a mistake. So are Trump’s false statements lies?

There are two possible answers to that question. One is that they are indeed lies because Trump knows they are false when he makes them, and he intends to deceive his audience into believing them. The other is that Trump does not know that what he says is untrue. He may believe that what he says expresses factual truth. Let’s take a closer look at each of those possibilities so we can see which of them is worse.

First possibility: Trump knows that what he says is factually untrue. He knows, for example, that he did not win the 2020 presidential election. He knows, for example, that the election was fair and legally legitimate and that the American voters simply elected Joe Biden not Donald Trump. If this is the case, Trump is perhaps the most cynical politician this country has ever seen. If this is the case, he takes his followers for gullible, ignorant saps who will believe anything he tells them. He knows that millions of Americans will take what he says as true simply because he said it. If Trump knows that his falsehoods are false, he is telling lies in a cynical attempt to restore himself to power, power being the only thing Trump respects.

Second possibility: Trump does not know that what he says is factually untrue. If this is the case, Trump is pathologically delusional. If this is true, Trump is living in an alternate reality in which the facts are just different than they are in the reality in which most of us live. In that alternate reality, the facts are what Trump wants them to be. Because he wants them to be true, for him they are true. If this is the case, Trump is mentally ill. He is so delusional that he cannot be psychologically or psychiatrically healthy. If this is the case, Trump needs professional medical help that he is not getting.

So I ask: Which of these two possibilities is worse for the country of which Trump dreams of being an authoritarian ruler? This is not an easy question to answer, but I believe that the second possibility, that Trump is delusional, is more dangerous for our country than is the first possibility, that Trump knows that what he says is false and intends his statements to deceive. If Trump is merely a cynical deceiver, at least he knows the real facts of the matters about which he lies. If he does, there is at least the possibility that he could respond in at least a nondestructive, if not necessarily constructive, way to events in actual reality, as unlikely as that may be. If he is delusional, that possibility does not exist. He would be able to respond only to the falsehoods of his mentally unhealthy reality, the reality his disordered or even diseased mind creates for him. If Trump is delusional, constructive actions are not only unlikely from him, they are impossible.

Both of these possibilities are immensely dangerous for our country. In either case, Trump will use his falsehoods in his campaign to destroy American democracy and make himself our Fűhrer. We simply cannot allow Trump to gain power again whether he’s lying or whether he believes his falsehoods. Either way, the man is an American fascist. He does not intend his actions in the political sphere to benefit the country or the world. He intends them only to give himself power. It’s bad enough when politicians are just wrong about what they think the country needs. Things like the Republicans slashing taxes for the wealthy are horribly destructive, but it may be that some Republicans actually believe they are good for the country. It would be far worse than it would be with those Republicans in charge for us to put a man back in the White House who gives not one good God damn about anything or anybody but himself.

If Trump is the Republican nominee for president next year, as it appears he will be, our choice in next year’s election will not be between two different but well-intended visions of what this country needs. It will be between preserving American democracy and destroying it. Trump and his MAGA movement are not about the welfare of the American people much less the people of the world. They are about Trump in power. Period. We simply cannot let that happen. We must use every nonviolent means at our disposal to keep Donald Trump out of the White House.