kettle logic

Trump’s Freudian kettle logic

Donald Trump recently posted a series of tweets slamming Jill Stein’s call for a recount. The contradictory nature of those tweets was a perfect example of “kettle logic.”

In “The Interpretation of Dreams,” Sigmund Freud used the term “kettle logic” to describe the series of mutually exclusive defenses put forth by a man who returns a kettle to his neighbor in a damaged condition:


According to Freud, “A complicated defense, but so much the better; if only one of these three lines of defense is recognized as valid, the man must be acquitted.”

In a recent posting in The New Republic, Jeet Heer likens Donald Trump’s tweets about Stein’s recount effort to this very kind of “kettle logic.”

Donald’s tweets:

  • So much time and money will be spent [on the recount]—same result! Sad.

What’s going on here? Trump frequently plays the larger game by throwing out lots of contradictory smaller untruths. Candy to distract a multitude of audiences. And, according to Heer, therein lies the real danger.

Fact-checkers typically look at individual comments a politician makes and judge them against known evidence. That’s fine so far as it goes, but it simply establishes the accuracy or inaccuracy of that one statement, rather than the pattern of deception or even irrationality at work….

To be able to constantly lie and get people to accept contrary statements is, after all, an assertion of power. And it’s a type of power Trump understands all too well.

What’s really wrong with Trump’s claim of widespread illegal voting fraud isn’t just that it is untrue but also that, when combined with his other comments, it shows Trump doesn’t care about rational logic at all.

As Heer points out, “Unless we analyze how he’s attacking not just facts but also logic, we can’t measure the full damage he’s doing and respond accordingly.”

Faulty logic can be much more dangerous than mere untruths. Sometimes we focus too much on the trees and miss the fact that the forest is on fire.