In his book Mein Kampf, Adolph Hitler coined the phrase, “The Big Lie”. It is a propaganda technique that appeals to the prejudices of listeners. As Hitler explained the technique, “If you tell a big enough lie and tell it frequently enough, it will be believed.” He added, “Make the lie big, make it simple, keep saying it, and eventually they will believe it.” And, finally, “The great masses of people will more easily fall victims to a big lie than a small one.”
A recent example of this might be the 2016 campaign claim by Donald Trump that news reports of the day chronicled “thousands of Muslims in New Jersey cheering as the Twin Towers were destroyed on 9/11”. Despite being informed that there was no evidence that this event ever happened, candidate Trump continued to use the lie regularly in his campaign speeches…in much the way he frequently raised the (discredited) claim that Barack Obama was not born in the United States. By the end of the campaign, polls showed that a surprising percentage of American adults believed these bogus claims.
Once he became President, Mr. Trump wasted no time in expanding the use of The Big Lie technique. He has loudly proclaimed that his electoral victory was one of the biggest ever (it wasn’t even close), he would have won the popular vote except for 3 to 5 million illegal votes cast for Hillary Clinton (no evidence of that), and that the crowd at his inauguration was much larger than that of Barack Obama, eight years earlier (aerial photos show Trump’s crowd to be half the size of Obama’s). A week hasn’t gone by when President Trump hasn’t revisited these Big Lies, and has loudly chastised the media for contradicting him.
It has become apparent, therefore, that we Americans may be dealing with someone who is worse than a simple liar (after all, most politicians are adept liars.) Unfortunately for us, we may have just hired a psychopathic bullshitter to run our country and lead the Free World.
As someone has noted, “A liar cares about concealing reality. A bullshitter, like the President, is totally indifferent to how things really are. At least with a liar, you can present evidence to the contrary.” Trump’s response to the media who have called him on bullshit…is to accuse them of bias, declaring them, not the Democrats, to be “The Opposition”.
And, finally, “Bullshit is unavoidable whenever circumstances require someone to talk without knowing what he is talking about.”
Hence, you have President Trump denying climate change, describing his Administration “running like a finely-tuned machine”, and imposing a 7-nation travel ban because of terrorist atrocities like the “Bowling Green Massacre”.
He doesn’t seem to care whether the things he says describe reality correctly; he just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.
Our new President is having some trouble filling out his Administration, despite his confident announcements. Some of his high-level picks have not passed muster (resignation of National Security Advisor Flynn), could not be confirmed by the Senate (Army Secretary and Labor Secretary), and Trump’s replacement choice for NSA Chief publicly rejected the job due to interference from other White House insiders (he described the offered position a “shit sandwich”). It appears that the stench that surrounds the Oval Office is growing so strong that qualified individuals are avoiding it like the plague. Yet, as the President has said, his month-old Administration is purring along “like a finely-tuned machine”.
“Next question?”
I am beginning to worry about this Presidency. I was hoping that a different guy was going to emerge, once elected, a mature man, an intelligent leader, someone who would soften the rhetoric and attempt to bring people together so that he could actually achieve his stated goal: Make America Great Again.
However, what we seem to have foisted upon ourselves (and we have no one else to blame!) is an immature, limited-intelligence bullshitter who seems to be incapable of separating fact from fiction…if he even cared to do so. What he seems to be good at, if anything, is bullshitting the American public, and passing it off (in his mind) as effective governance.
This is going to be a very ugly time in American history, folks.