THE PHILOSOPHICAL LESSON FROM PRESIDENT TRUMP

Postill magazine  February 1, 2025 by Pascal Engel

 

It is customary on both sides of the Atlantic to vilify Donald Trump, and to see in him the main culprit for most of the ills of recent years: the definitive transformation of politics into a reality show, the elevation of lies to the status of a communication system, nepotism and plutocracy, climate denial, isolationist nationalism, populism, Neronian authoritarianism, sexism, proto-fascism, and above all vulgarity. All this is perfectly true, and for once opinion is totally right. That is also a bit of a problem.

 

Because Trump is anything but a simpleton. He is not another G.W. Bush. The system he has put in place is formidable: the more indignant people become, the more they evoke Caligula or Mussolini with their Godwin points, the more they fall into his trap, because that is all he is waiting for—he has understood that not only are people wrong, but they also like to be wrong. He is in fact, perhaps unwittingly, a profound philosopher. Did he not warn us that he was “a very stable genius?” He had the merit of posing a number of perennial philosophical questions. I can think of at least seven.

 

Truth

 

The first concerns the notion of truth. By brazenly lying, uttering obvious untruths and letting his press secretaries resort to concepts like “alternative facts,” Trump has drawn attention to the absurdity of defining truth as what is “true for me” and the incoherence of relativism. He has thus done more service to the defense of truisms such as “truth is conformity to facts” or “facts are facts” than any dissertation by philosophers who have attacked post-modernism by trying to refute it with rational arguments.

 

Trump also made very clear the difference between two conceptions of truth: the classical conception, according to which truth is correspondence with facts, and the pragmatic conception, according to which what is useful or what pays off is true. He explicitly proposed to define truth in the second way. To journalist Jon Karl he said: “I always try to tell the truth, and I always want to tell the truth. But sometimes something happens and there's a change, but I always want to be truthful.” In other words, when things turn out differently than I thought they would—understand: to my disadvantage, or if my advantage is to present them otherwise—I do not tell the truth, but I am still sincere. In other words, my intentions are good, but my intentions are directed by what suits me, or is useful to me, and that is then for me the measure of the true. This aspect of Trumpism has obviously not escaped the notice of subtle Machiavellians and contemporary disciples of Protagoras. But are they well equipped to criticize it?

 

Sincerity

 

All this shows that Trump is aware, like any politician worthy of the name, of the difference between truth as utility and truth as correspondence to facts, on the one hand, and between truth and sincerity, on the other, and of the fact that it is far more important to present oneself as respectful of the latter than of the former. Truth is a property of statements, judgments or speeches, whereas sincerity, or veracity, is a property of people and their intentions. One can utter false statements while being sincere, and true statements while lying. In the eyes of many of his voters and supporters, and in his own eyes, Trump may lie, but he is no less sincere. His technique is not that of ordinary lying, but rather that of deception. You can deceive by telling the truth, or by not quite telling the truth, or by keeping the public guessing as to whether you are dealing with truth or falsehood. The difference lies in the fact that the liar intends to say the wrong thing, even though he knows it is not true, whereas the deceiver tries to mislead or confuse, without taking responsibility for his assertions, as in a shell game.

 

It is also the bullshit technique, so well described by Harry Frankfurt (On Bullshit) The liar respects the truth and observes its rules, whereas the bullshitter does not care. He will say anything, regardless of whether it is true or false; and he will say it anyway to suit his own interests. If he senses that his audience has changed its mind or does not approve, he changes his tune according to their expectations. It is the old formula for political opportunism. Trump pushes it to its limits, even saying things that go against his own interests, just because they pop into his head.

 

This technique is also used for fake news in the media, and here Trump's individual strategy meets that of the Internet collective, which enables falsehoods to be propagated exponentially. Fake information can be understood neither as falsehood nor as truth, because it is up to the receiver to decide whether, according to his or her tastes and preferences, it is or is not. Often the receiver sees it as false, but prefers to hold it as true, and most of the time does not care, whether it is or not. It is the formula for bullshit—just talking. That is why Trump calls any truth he does not like fake news. It is the pragmatist criterion of truth combined with relativism: “What I like is true, what I don't like is false, but you're entitled to say the same.” This is why, for example, he can say after the events in Charlottesville: “There are good people on both sides.” That is also why his opponents are given names that can just as easily apply to himself: “Crooked Hillary,” “Lying Ted,” like children in the playground: “Liar yourself.”

 

Assertion

 

Trump is also a profound philosopher of assertion. Philosophers of language debate whether there is a norm of assertion, as a declarative speech act. Many consider that assertion is governed by the norm of truth: to assert something is to represent oneself as saying something that is true. Others say that assertion is governed by a stronger norm, that of knowledge: the speaker must not only believe that what he is saying is true, and intend to communicate that he is saying the truth, but know that what he is saying is true. One wonders whether Trump follows this standard. The bullshitter clearly does not. In principle he should, not only by virtue of a linguistic norm, but also by virtue of a political norm—should not a president of the United States, or even an important politician, state what he knows, not just what he believes? Even if he does not know everything, does he not have access to information to which the public does not have access, and is he not responsible for what he says to a higher degree than the ordinary citizen? But if he denies any such responsibility, is he not undermining his very presidential function? Or does he not redefine it, by crudely admitting that a President of the United States has the right to say anything?

 

According to some philosophers, assertion is not governed by standards as strict as truth and knowledge; it depends on contexts and intentions, and saying is not governed by any central standard. If this is the case, then Trump is, from the point of view of the pragmatics of discourse, perfectly legitimate to say anything, depending on the circumstances. But it is also clear that he is not some drunk sitting at a bar. He says what he says according to certain intentions he has, what he holds as those of his interlocutors, and his general objectives. Even if it is in his interest to sound sincere, the less sincere he is, the less he will be believed.

 

Trust

Whether or not an assertion, of which public speech is a paradigmatic manifestation, is governed by the norm of truth or that of knowledge, the question always arises as to what degree of information or knowledge authorizes it. This is particularly the case when it comes to the system of expertise. Experts, such as scientists on climate change, say one thing. Trump denies it (which shows that he still respects the norm of assertion, because to deny p is to assert the not p). In the case of scientific expertise, there is knowledge, even if it is in principle open to revision or amendment, and even if, in the way it is presented, it may be biased and linked to political interests. But when it comes to political communication, particularly via the highly ephemeral medium of Twitter-X/Truth-Social which the President uses most of the time, how much knowledge underlies the messages? For Trump, and for most of his supporters, this question is irrelevant, because the epistemic standard of Trumpian assertions is not knowledge, but trust.

 

There is a classic American character, that of the confidence man—the con-man—whose most famous incarnations are Phineas Taylor Barnum, Frank Abagnale (the hero of the film Catch Me If You Can) and the central character of Melville's novel, The Confidence Man. His Masquerade. Trump is a con-man. The philosophy of testimony opposes two conceptions—one, defended by Hume, says that if testimony is to be credible, it must go back to the sources of its justification, and the other, defended by Thomas Reid, says that testimony must be trusted by default. The con-man obviously relies on the latter. But it is one thing for testimony to be credible by default (which explains why we are so gullible); it is another thing for it to be normatively justified, whatever the source. Even Christ's disciples, like Thomas, rejected the second thesis. Trump's merit is to have brought these questions, which are central to social epistemology, back to the forefront.

 

Morality

 

Trump's contribution to moral philosophy is no less important than his contributions to the theory of knowledge. The author of the anonymous New York Times op-ed in September 2018 lamented, “The heart of the problem is the president's amorality. Anyone who works with him knows that he is bound by no discernible principles to guide his decision-making.” This observer reminded us of the distinction between immoralism and amoralism, and the relevance of the Trump case to understanding it. Someone who is immoral is someone who ignores the good, goes against what is just, or rejects any system of morality or moral value, which presupposes that we recognize that there is such a thing as acting morally or justly. Medea says: video meliora, deteriora sequor, “I see the best but I do the worst.” But Trump is neither Thrasymachus, nor Callicles, nor Medea, nor Nietzsche, and he certainly has not read Gide's The Immoralist. He is an amoralist—no moral considerations move him; and it is fair to say that he has not the slightest idea of what it would mean to be moral. Perhaps he maintains, as is often said, a kind of poor man's Machiavellianism—that politics does not need morality.

 

The Alt-Right also hates political correctness. This position would make his attitude to truth perfectly consistent—if truth and veracity have no moral value, and if they do not have to be taken into consideration, it is understandable that he should allow himself to say anything, according to his interests, and that he should mock the father of the American hero Humayun Khan killed in Iraq, or a disabled journalist. You can blame him, but you cannot blame him for being inconsistent. But the Trumpian position can be interpreted differently—perhaps he maintains that ethical action should not be based on principles. According to a school of moral philosophy known as “particularism,” acting morally does not consist in applying a principle, but in acting well according to particular situations. So maybe Trump is a moralist, but of the particularist variety?

 

Specious present

 

Kafka said, in his Diary: “The bachelor lives only by the moment.” But Trump is not a bachelor, even if he may be a bachelor machine à la Duchamp. He lives in the moment, both because he is always, as we have noted, stream of consciousness, not in the manner of Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway, but in the manner of his preferred mode of communication, Twitter-X/Truth Social. He lives in what William James calls the “specious present,” the brief moment when we are aware of the present, but which has already passed by the time we realize it. Bergson, then Husserl, analyzed this awareness of time, but the 45th President of the United States is more concerned with the psychopathology of attention deficit disorder, which, like Twitter/X, turns this pathology into a business. He does not insult anyone, because his insults (such as when he calls his head of diplomacy “as stupid as his feet” and “as lazy as a snake”) are as quickly forgotten as they are uttered.

 

Ideal

 

The Trump presidency contains a more general philosophical lesson, prophetically drawn long ago by Richard Rorty in Achieving our Country (1998): “At that point, something will crack. The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for-someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots. A scenario like that of Sinclair Lewis' novel It Can't Happen Here may then be played out. For once such a strongman takes office, nobody can predict what will happen. In I 932, most of the predictions made about what would happen if Hindenburg named Hitler chancellor were wildly overoptimistic. One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past forty years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion. The words "nigger" and "kike" will once again be heard in the workplace. All the sadism which the academic Left has tried to make unacceptable to its students will come flooding back. All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet.”

 

Rorty has been widely praised for his lucidity, for thus predicting the Trump phenomenon, and beyond those we are experiencing in Europe. But there is one essential point on which Rorty was not lucid. He believed that we should not revisit postmodernism's rejection of the classical ideals of democracy founded on values of truth, knowledge, reason and justice taken as moral values, because he held these values to be empty. He believed that the American left should not return to these values, but replace them with other, more social ones, such as solidarity and “deep” democracy à la Dewey. But I believe, on the contrary, that what the Trump presidency shows is that democracy will only revive if these classic ideals and values are maintained and reaffirmed.

 

It is not always so clear in books about Trump. Those by Jason Stanley (How Fascism Works, 2018) or Tim Snyders (On Tyranny, 2017) rely on the imputation of fascism. They are not wrong, of course; but they are wrong when they analyze its propaganda as well-oiled rhetoric. Umberto Eco said of Mussolini's fascism that it was all rhetoric, and not an ounce of philosophy. It seems to me, on the contrary, that Trump's policies contain a lot of philosophy and rather little rhetoric—he does not intend to persuade. And if we have to fight him, it is on that score. Then we will have to pit philosophy against philosophy, and, for example, take issue with Schopenhauerians like Houellebecq who say they are delighted with Trump and applaud his nihilism. There is nothing to be delighted about, and religion will not save us from him.

 

 

 

IThis essay was originally published in AOC (January 9, 2019).