Species of Deception

I’ve been thinking about the nature of President Trump’s dishonesty, and about why it seems somehow more acceptable to a large number of people than one might expect.

We are resigned to the idea that politicians lie. We expect them to make promises during their campaigns that they have no intention of trying to keep once elected. We expect them to triangulate, to position themselves during the primaries and then reposition themselves for the general election. We expect them to propose ideas that we all suspect can’t work, and to paint a rosy future that none of us expects will ever materialize. To varying degrees, we see this kind of behavior as normal for politicians and candidates.

We are less sanguine about deeper deceptions. It’s one thing to listen to a candidate promise us the moon, while suspecting that he probably knows he can’t deliver on that promise once in office. It’s a very different thing to believe that he has a secret agenda, and that he is withholding his true intentions because he understands that, if we knew them, he wouldn’t have our vote.

The distinction has to do with the motivation behind the dishonesty. We know the candidate wants to be elected and, once elected, he wants to continue to curry our favor. We understand that. But we do not want to believe that he has political goals that he keeps secret from us, because that would suggest a kind of betrayal that goes beyond simply failing to deliver on the promises he’s made. Lying to us to get into office is not the same as lying about the reason he wants to be in office and the things he intends to do once he gets there. One is salesmanship, the other borders on treachery.

While President Trump says a lot of things that aren’t true, his dishonesty seems not to conceal a secret agenda. So far as his political plans and ambitions go, he has been a remarkably transparent President. His general rejection of convention is part of this: he seems not to care if people think him outrageous, and one never has the sense that he’s holding something back — indeed, he seems incapable of it. One may tire of his sometimes absurd overstatements and boastful claims, but one rarely suspects that he is a sinister figure bent on fulfilling his own secret ambitions.

His major goals seem anodyne: a growing economy, fairer trade, more manufacturing jobs, secure borders, less regulation, greater employment. Nothing about his conduct suggests that he has further ambitions which he keeps shrouded in secrecy, or which he reveals only to a small number of like-minded associates.

What all this means is that, while we can’t necessarily trust what the President says, we can generally trust that we know what he’s trying to do. For those of us who generally like what he’s trying to do, that makes the other, less consequential dishonesty easier to accept.

This isn’t a defense of dishonesty, but rather a suggestion that all kinds of dishonesty aren’t equally objectionable.