The Truth About Donald Trump’s Lies

Debunking them as lies misses the point. They’re aspirational. They signal what might become reality.

Donald Trump gestures as he speaks during the third U.S. presidential debate on Oct. 19 in Las Vegas.

Win McNamee/Getty Images

“The essential characteristic of fascist propaganda was never its lies, for this is something more or less common to propaganda everywhere and of every time,” wrote the late political theorist Hannah Arendt in her 1945 essay “The Seeds of a Fascist International.” “The essential thing was that they exploited the age-old Occidental prejudice which confuses reality with truth, and made that ‘true’ which until then could only be stated as a lie.”

Put in plain language, fascists didn’t lie to obscure the truth; they lied to signal what would eventually become truth. Or to use Arendt’s analogy, “It is as though one were to debate with a potential murderer as to whether his future victim were dead or alive, completely forgetting that man can kill and that the murderer, by killing the person in question, could promptly provide proof of the correctness of this statement.”


But, following Arendt, debunking Trump’s lie as a lie misses the point of his lying. Since 2013, when the Supreme Court struck key provisions from the Voting Rights Act, GOP lawmakers in states across the country have pushed and pursued strict laws for voter identification and voter suppression. Republicans in Kansas, North Carolina, Ohio, Texas, and Wisconsin (among others) have tried to burden voters with cumbersome requirements, convoluted procedures, closed precincts, and reduced time for voting. In each case, Republicans began their push with broad accusations of voter fraud influenced by figures like conservative activist Hans von Spakovsky, a key architect of ID laws and other methods of voter suppression. “We call this restoring confidence in government,” said Thom Tillis, then-speaker of the North Carolina House of Representatives, in support of a strict voter ID law. “There is some evidence of voter fraud, but that’s not the primary reason or doing this. There are a lot of people who are just concerned with the potential risk of fraud.”

As president, Trump will have the power to take harsh action on voting rights and access. His Department of Justice, for example, could decline enforcement of much of the Voting Rights Act, freeing Republican-led states to enact strict and restrictive voting laws. Under Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions, Trump’s pick for attorney general and a longtime opponent of broad and inclusive voting rights, that outcome looks likely. Trump could follow inaction with efforts to combat alleged voter fraud through investigation into voting rights and voter registration groups, and coordination of voter purges (trimming the rolls of registered voters). Trump’s top candidate for the Department of Homeland Security, Kris Kobach, has proposed as much, adapting his draconian policies as Kansas secretary of state for the nation at large.

Other voting skeptics in the Trump administration include chief adviser Stephen Bannon, who according to the New York Times, once questioned the value of universal suffrage, suggesting that only “property owners should be allowed to vote.” When told that this would exclude many black Americans, Bannon allegedly said, “Maybe that’s not such a bad thing.”

When Trump decries imaginary fraud in the presidential election, is he lying for its own sake? Is he lying to assuage his ego after losing the popular vote (in an election that he nonetheless won)? Or is he lying to clear the path for a federal assault on voting rights? Is he sowing the ground for a time when that lie—our elections are “rigged”—is the reality?


