Defining Lies
While I have no interest in voting for or otherwise backing our former president, I think it is also a mistake to abandon all principles and standards in opposition to Donald Trump. For one thing, to do otherwise will not thwart him or convert his supporters, if that were an aim. For another, the harm to principles and standards can be longer lasting.
Writing at RealClearPolitics where he is executive editor, journalist Carl Cannon wrote an essay I feel like I’ve been in need of for a very long time. It is an admonition to journalists to maintain their standards rather than discard them in their zeal to defeat Trump. Cannon is no Trump fan, but he does find that other reporters and analysts have proven willing to bend semantics in service of their goal of defeating Trump. In his essay, he delves into the specifics.
I’m opposed to Trump enough to think that nearly anything you can do to keep him out of further elected office is justified. But I also think you can’t defeat someone who lacks morals and scruples by behaving similarly amoral and unscrupulous. The starting point in this case is the definition of the word lie. The concept of a lie has a only a few limited key traits in its definition: knowingly telling an untruth, and doing so with the intention of gaining personal advantage. Lying is more than just spinning yarns or explaining a hare-brained idiosyncratic theory about how something in the world works. A person effectively cannot lie about things the person knows nothing about. Lies are more specific than bad-faith arguments, delusions, and unjustified assumptions.
As Cannon says, journalists took the emergence of Trump to be reason enough to justify openly declaring statements by a politician to be lies. To do so requires the journalist to know what the actual truth is, making the journalists more than people who report on what happened, but instead into arbiters of universally indisputable facts. This is why it had previously been the professional standard for mainstream journalism not to rate political claims as truths or lies. To know that Trump said things he knew to be untrue requires knowing something unknowable about Trump’s psyche, too, and Cannon recounts how journalists once lost to Barry Goldwater for trying to have mental health professionals rate him publicly as mentally unfit when he ran for president against President Johnson in 1964. The courts ruled against the journalists and psychiatrists for doing so, finding their behavior libelous. The so-called Goldwater Rule set a new standard for press reporting.
Strictly speaking, to declare a statement a “lie” as objectively as possible requires the person analyzing the statement not only to know what is factual, but also the liar’s familiarity with the truth and his mental state when allegedly lying. Thus, journalists would have to know whether a politician is sane or insane—not exactly something within their expertise.
After an examination of journalistic attempts to define Trump’s psyche as a form of narcissism, Cannon says:
What does all this have to do with whether Donald Trump lied about the 2020 election, and is lying still? The short answer is that maybe it has nothing to do with it. Or maybe everything.
To the prosecutors and most of the legacy media, the evidence against Trump is overwhelming: A slew of accomplished and ethical Republicans — many of them who worked directly for the president — told him the truth about the 2020 election.
“There is no world, there is no option in which you do not leave the White House on January 20,” Deputy White House Counsel Patrick Philbin told Trump.
So why didn’t he listen? Because that’s not what grandiose narcissists do.
Unfortunately, much of special prosecutor Jack Smith’s case against Trump lying, too, raising the evidentiary bar higher. Trump would have to know which of his advisors knew the truth and which ones were just lying to him by telling him what he wanted to hear, facts be damned. Unless you are a devoted Trump supporter, there is little doubt but that Trump would gladly believe things to be true that he wanted to be true over things that he didn’t want—especially if we also assume Trump has the psychological faults of a grandiose narcissist.
Assuming Trump lied requires knowing what the truth was, that Trump knew what the truth was, that Trump was psychologically capable of telling the difference between fact and fiction, and therefore what Trump’s psychological idiosyncrasies and/or pathologies permitted him to believe.
Are journalists and commentators equipped to rate all of that accurately?
As Cannon concludes, assuming Trump’s grandiose narcissism for the sake of argument:
In other words, the counter-argument to Trump lying about losing the 2020 election is that he lacks the wherewithal to admit he lost, even to himself. As I mentioned earlier, this is not a legal defense he would ever use, and narcissism doesn’t meet the legal definition of insanity anyway. But predicating two sweeping criminal cases on the premise that Trump was lying (as Smith and Atlanta prosecutors have done) and basing press coverage of him on the same basis (as the media has done), assumes a capacity Trump may not possess.
Until recently, Trump’s propensity to bluster has served him well in life: He made a name for himself in New York real estate, starred in a reality television show, and bested all comers in the 2016 presidential race that put him in the White House. Throughout that journey, Trump made it clear that the worst insult he can hurl at someone is that they are “a loser.” Trump does not see himself as a loser. Hence, he simply couldn’t bring himself to see he’d lost the election.
As I say, I’ve got no favorable opinions or feelings towards Trump whom I find thoroughly detestable. But I’m also not satisfied with reducing the standards of everything else for the convenience of more easily disqualifying Trump. And if we consider the fact that the method will persuade no one but those who already reject Trump, what purpose can such lowered standards actually serve?
100% agree with your essay today. Or well over 100% if we are using that kind of curve.
“Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.” MLK