The Truth About Lies

The antipresident has increased the number and outrageousness of his lies, which already were of unimaginable proportion and quantity for anyone in any kind of authority.

Dana Milbank's Washington Post column on Tuesday is headlined "Trump's not a liar, he's a madman."  But in essence it's a false choice.  The antipresident is a madman in the sense that the Mad Men were.  It's called advertising, public relations.  You repeat something over and over, until it's true to your target audience, or even to everybody.

Does a certain detergent give your shirts a "whiter white?"  Who the hell knows?  But a lot of Americans of a certain age still remember that phrase, that claim.

Advertisers spread their claims with money, by buying space in print media and on the internet, and air time in electronic media.  The felt need to make an argument in favor of the claims has been largely absent from advertising since the 1960s.  The whole point is to make a claim, and repeat it endlessly.

When everybody in the world is subjected constantly to the words of the antipresident, it's the biggest advertising platform in the world.  Does it matter if anything he says is true?  Not really.  If you buy him, you buy what he says.  If you don't and you argue, it just repeats his message to his target audience.

The antipresident may be delusional, he may be a pathological liar on top of this.  But his mode of speech alone shows that he makes the major lies strategically, because he repeats his key lie, his key phrases, over and over, in the same brief statement.  He uses simple words to make large claims.  It's classic advertising technique.

Right now, says Politico, he's using his lies to motivate his voters for the midterms.  Repeating lies has become a key component of Republican electoral politics.  But that's not even the most sinister function.

Lies built Hitler's Germany.  And lies are building Homegrown Hitler's America. Politically, the way to dictatorship is incremental.  As Jonathan Chiat noted, he is deploying strategic lies to force compromises with basic principles within the Justice Department in order to subvert the Mueller investigation, and turn the R electorate against it.  All to institutionalize his belief that the antipresident is above the law.

Big lies force little surrenders.  Big lies energize racism, dehumanization of nonwhite immigrants.

"Hungarian communist leader Mátyás Rákosi invented the phrase “salami tactics” to describe how his party established a dictatorship," Chiat begins.  It's destroying democracy a slice at a time.

But it was also the tactics of the Nazi Party and Hitler.  And that's more apt than comparison to a small eastern European country, because Germany was a world power that plunged the world into the most destructive war in human history.

 Nobody wants to say that because the liars of the rabid right have deployed the Hitler charge so wildly that Hitler is effectively gone from the historical record anybody can cite.  Another very effective use of strategic lying.

These techniques are not new, they are not mysterious.  And yet we keep falling for them.