His name is Legion

During the presidential campaign, Donald Trump repeated this particularly brazen lie over and over again:

Oct. 28, 2016: “You won’t hear this from the media: We have the highest murder rate in this country in 45 years. You don’t hear that from these people. They don’t want to talk about it. The highest murder rate in the United States in 45 years.”

Oct. 29, 2016: “The murder rate in the United States, it’s the worst, the highest it’s been in 45 years. Nobody talks about that — nobody talks about that.”

Oct. 30, 2016: “Murder is – in 45 years, right now, the rates are the highest they’ve been … and they don’t want to talk about it.”

He’s still at it.

Trump’s claim about the supposedly massive spike in the murder rate is 99.98% false, but it is derived, in classic Goebbels-style, from a tiny grain of truth: the murder rate in the US did go up by 10% in 2015.  Nevertheless it was still lower than in any year between 1964 and 2010, and half as high as it was 25 years ago.

As some of the replies in the Sopan Deb Twitter feed illustrate, the fact that the national murder rate went up last year, as well as the fact that it has risen sharply in Chicago and a few other cities, makes Trump’s egregiously false statement “true” for the purposes of X% of Trump’s supporters, with X no doubt being some horrifyingly large number.

Why is Trump continuing to tell fantastic, completely transparent lies about easily verifiable facts, and how does he get away with it? Imagine if Hillary Clinton had made comparable statements at some point during the campaign.  This is difficult to imagine because Clinton is a normal politician, and normal politicians assume that constantly repeating egregious, easily verifiable falsehoods would create a non-stop storm of media opprobrium, which in turn would make them unacceptable to large numbers of voters.

For example, to behave in a manner at all analogous to Trump, Clinton would have to do something along the lines of repeating over and over again the the total national debt was at its lowest point in 45 years — that is, she would have to continually assert something that was both grotesquely and non-controversially false in regard to an important public policy issue.

I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that if Clinton had claimed something like that, and then continued to do it after it was pointed out that her statement was completely false, the mainstream media would have declared her to be literally insane, and would have insisted that she be removed from the Democratic ticket.

But of course it’s impossible to imagine Hillary Clinton doing anything like that, because, again, Clinton is a normal politician.

Trump gets away with behavior that would (supposedly — we’ll see going forward) destroy any normal politician for at least a couple of different reasons:

(1) His supporters are either completely indifferent to his norm-destruction, or they don’t like it but they tolerate it because they’re Republicans and they voted for the Republican candidate because he wasn’t the Democrat and/or not Hillary Clinton specifically, or they’re actively enthusiastic about it, because it enrages people they hate.

All these reactions are enabled by the ignorance, stupidity, and cynicism of the public (“you can say anything with statistics, the government just makes stuff up, all politicians lie,” etc.).

(2)  The establishment media in this country operate within a frame that enables Trump’s norm-violations.  Since it is an article of faith for these people that their coverage must be “non-partisan.” that means that all coverage must ultimately fit in a roughly tit-for-tat structure.  So while Trump told (and continues to tell) fantastic and egregious lies about all sorts of well-established facts, Hillary Clinton shaded the truth about certain aspects of her private e-mail server. Repeat as needed, i.e.. endlessly.

An interesting question is whether Trump’s example will inspire heretofore normal politicians to behave in a similar manner going forward. Since he paid no apparent price for lying constantly and egregiously about everything, why not do the same?  In particular, why shouldn’t the Democratic nominee simply tell fantastic crowd-pleasing lies till the cows come home, given the ubiquity of false equivalence, both sides do it ism, and so forth? Hillary Clinton got more negative media coverage over the course of the entire campaign than Donald Trump! And while Trump’s media coverage was somewhat more negative during the general election than Clinton’s was, it wasn’t more negative to anything like the extent that his incredible behavior warranted.

I’m serious about this: what actual cost would there be to the Democratic candidate in 2020 claiming over and over again that he or she was going to eliminate the deficit and expand the military, while guaranteeing every American free medical care and expanded social security and medicare benefits?   No doubt this would increase the amount of tongue-clucking on the Sunday morning chat shows, but that’s a price we should probably be willing to pay to avoid the re-election of a dime-store fascist with an IQ of 97 and the emotional control of an overly tired three-year-old.

Speaking of which, what motivates Trump to lie in the way he does? Some speculation:

(1) It obviously works, and the only thing he cares about is “winning.”  Telling Trump that an efficacious statement is a lie is not giving him any information that seems meaningful to him.  It’s like telling him his statement has three adjectives and two adverbs.  It’s not relevant information. (As commenters are noting, this particular lie is politically powerful because it’s an implicit claim about a supposed explosion of out of control “super criminals” in “urban” areas nudge nudge wink wink).

(2) Trump is an almost Platonic bullshitter in the Frankfurtian sense.  He’s beyond lying, as it were, because he has no interest whatever in whether his statements are true or not (Frankfurt’s point is that you can’t try to lie without at least caring about the truth enough to try to avoid it. Trump doesn’t care, at all, which in an important sense makes him more indifferent to the truth, and more destructive of it, than a self-conscious liar).

(3) Trump is a basically ignorant and profoundly anti-intellectual person, which are qualities that really help a man believe his own bullshit.  For all his money and fame and associated social status, he’s at bottom just another know-nothing yahoo.  Government statistics are infinitely manipulable or  made up altogether, everybody knows crime is skyrocketing because 42 people were shot in Chicago over the weekend, I read somewhere (on Infowars) that millions of people voted illegally etc etc etc.

I suspect this last explanation is a key factor in maintaining is popularity, such as it is.  Trump’s overall mental attitude and public behavior resonate with tens of millions of Americans, because in one sense he’s a very ordinary guy, which is to say he’s an incurious and bigoted idiot. And his name is Legion, for they are many.

Update: Jeremy W in comments quotes this interesting take from Jacob Levy:

Saying something obviously untrue, and making your subordinates repeat it with a straight face in their own voice, is a particularly startling display of power over them. It’s something that was endemic to totalitarianism. Arendt analyzed the huge lies and blatant reversals of language associated with the Holocaust. Havel documented the pervasive little lies, lies that everyone knew to be lies, of late Communism. And Orwell gave us the vivid “2+2=5.”

Being made to repeat an obvious lie makes it clear that you’re powerless; it also makes you complicit. You’re morally compromised. Your ability to stand on your own moral two feet and resist or denounce is lost. Part of this is a general tool for making people part of immoral groups. One child makes a second abuse a third. The second then can’t think he’s any better than the first, the bully, and can’t inform. In a gang or the Mafia, your first kill makes you trustworthy, because you’re now dependent on the group to keep your secrets, and can’t credibly claim to be superior to them.