Hi there, America. We need to have a talk.
We’re having a presidential election at the moment. Maybe you’ve heard about it? Maybe you’ve seen the TV show where the old lady in the ugly pantsuit and the old man in the horrible fake tan stand in front of the text of the Constitution and yell back and forth at each other? I’ll forgive you if you’re not super up on it; it’s kind of boring and insulting at the same time. It’s also kind of important, though.
The thing is, a lot of people seem to want to talk about this election as if it’s the same as every other election: Two people will lie to us for a few months, and then we’ll all go check the box for whoever’s lies offend us the least.
“So what if Hillary’s a liar?” Hillary voters will tell you. “All politicians lie!”
“So what if Trump is a liar?” Trump voters will tell you. “All politicians lie!”
But here’s the problem: Trump isn’t a liar.
He is, in fact, a bullshitter.
I’m not using the word “bullshit” here to be vulgar or provocative; the word has actually been used technically in the fields of rhetoric and philosophy, dating back to Princeton professor Harry Frankfurt’s 1989 treatise On Bullshit, where he argues:
It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction. A person who lies is thereby responding to the truth, and he is to that extent respectful of it. For the bullshitter…he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false….He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.
In other words, there’s a fundamental difference between lies and bullshit. The person telling lies knows the truth and seeks to conceal it; the person dispensing bullshit simply does not care what the truth is. The latter treats words as a means to an end, and whether they reflect reality or not never even crosses his or her mind.
Hillary Clinton lies. She knows the facts, and conceals them as it suits her. For proof, all you have to do is watch her debate performance, in which she danced around the established facts of her position on the Trans Pacific Partnership, her private email server, and several other issues — but these are lies, not bullshit.
Trump, on the other hand, bullshits. He doesn’t know what the truth is. He doesn’t care what the truth is. It’s not even entirely clear whether he believes an objective reality exists, or whether words have any connection to it. What “the truth” is, for him, depends entirely on what he can get out of it. If there’s applause to be won by saying something, he’ll say it; he doesn’t care if it’s true.
Perhaps the most obvious example of this is his position on the Iraq War. That he expressed support for it while it was first being discussed is a well established fact, but he continues to protest that he was against it from the beginning. Of course he does — at this point in history, nearly everyone agrees that Iraq was a mistake, so there’s a lot of political capital to be won by claiming you were prescient enough to oppose it.
It would give Trump too much credit, however, to imagine that he’s lying about this. It’s not that he realizes he once supported the Iraq War and now he’s pretending that never happened; he appears to genuinely believe that history unfolded otherwise. Whatever’s “true” in Trump’s mind is whatever gets him the most kudos at the moment. Of course I was against the Iraq War! I’m the smartest guy in the room!
We see this play out again and again in Trump’s campaign, such as when Hillary pointed out during the debate that Trump once claimed that climate change was a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese. Anyone willing to dig through Trump’s personal Twitter account can see this is indeed something he said, but he repeatedly insisted he had never said it.
In each case, Trump’s thought process (such as it is) is painfully apparent: I’m the smartest guy here. People seem to think that thing they say I said is dumb. Therefore, I must not have said it.
We all know someone like this — someone who’s incapable of letting reality interfere with their own self-perception. I have one person in my life who will routinely contradict others about basic facts, argue with them until they prove him wrong, and then immediately switch sides and try to convince them that they’ve been arguing his point of view the whole time. Not surprisingly, this individual has had trouble holding down a job.
None of this should be taken as an endorsement of Hillary, necessarily. I would say, however, that I’m not terribly worried by the prospect of a Hillary presidency. As we’ve seen, Hillary is nothing more than a liar, and while a liar may deny you access to the truth, she still knows what it is, and therefore can, potentially, deal with it.
I am, however, deeply alarmed at the prospect of a Trump presidency, because Trump is far worse than a liar. He is a bullshitter, and a bullshitter thinks he can rewrite the facts of reality simply by opening his mouth. Such a person is unfit for adulthood, let alone the presidency, and I cannot stop imagining the many, many ways such an individual could do harm to America, simply by sheer denial and willful ignorance.
Rioting in the streets? Can’t be, I made America safe again! Economy tanking? Not possible! I’m the smartest president in history, the greatest! I insulted Kim Jong Un’s mother and dared him to launch his nukes at us, and now he has? No, you did that. Loser.
The prospect of a president who is a liar does not worry me, because even a liar can still deal with the basic facts in front of them.
But the prospect of a president who simply spews bullshit?
Let’s just say I’m scared shitless.
Luke T. Harrington’s debut novel, OPHELIA, ALIVE (A GHOST STORY) is available now from Post Mortem Press. Elsewhere, his work has appeared at Cracked and BuzzFeed, and he writes the biweekly column “Dumb Moments in Church History” for Christianity Today. Follow him on Twitter or Facebook, if you want.
