[D66] Lying in State: Why Presidents Lie—and Why Trump Is Worse

[R.O.]

  American Deceptionalism

By
Reed Richardson
fair.org
8 min
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      Book Review

Lying in State: Why Presidents Lie—and Why Trump Is Worse

by Eric Alterman

*Basic Books*, 2020

George Washington: Turns out I can tell a lie. George Washington: Turns 
out I can tell a lie.

It is perhaps telling that the first known presidential lie in our 
nation’s history occurred just one year into the office’s history—and 
revolved around a deceptive campaign to square the new nation’s lofty 
founding principles with its ugly accommodation of chattel slavery.

Recently sworn-in President George Washington faced a dilemma in 1790 
after the US capital was moved from New York City to Philadelphia, 
because Pennsylvania state law decreed that all enslaved persons would 
be automatically freed after residing in the state for six straight 
months. Rather than accept his new home’s gradual abolitionism, our 
first Founding Father undertook a particularly craven scheme to 
circumvent the rule, by periodically shipping his enslaved servants back 
and forth to Virginia to reset their residency clock, and thus avoid 
having to manumit a single one of them.

It amounted to a cruel, 18th-century equivalent of a modern-day—and dare 
we say, Trumpian—tax-avoidance scam. And Washington all but admitted as 
much in a blunt letter to his plantation manager: “I wish to have it 
accomplished under pretext that may deceive both them and the Public.”

With that, a long and tragically counterproductive American political 
tradition was born.

That’s clearly the takeaway from Eric Alterman’s latest book, /Lying in 
State: Why Presidents Lie—and Why Trump Is Worse/ (*Basic Books*), which 
offers up that anecdote as but the first in a punishingly long and 
maddening list of White House lies and distortions. The book culminates, 
naturally, with an entire section devoted to the unprecedented disregard 
for facts and truth shown by the 45th president.

Alterman’s latest book serves as an expanded and updated version of his 
2004 look at the same subject, /When Presidents Lie/. In that book, the 
*Nation* columnist and Brooklyn College journalism professor examined 
several landmark moments of presidential deception in the 20th century, 
from Franklin Roosevelt misrepresenting his concessions at the Yalta 
conference, to Lyndon Johnson effectively concocting the Gulf of Tonkin 
incident to justify expanding the Vietnam War, to the infamously 
chimerical weapons of mass destruction used by George W. Bush as a false 
pretext for the invasion of Iraq.

/Lying in State/ reprises some of his previous work’s themes—foremost of 
which is that presidential lies are almost guaranteed to backfire 
spectacularly—but also digs deeper into the broader causes of the 
phenomenon. True to his media critic roots, Alterman also weaves in how 
the country’s corporate media often act as willing enablers to incessant 
White House attempts to deceive the polity. In fact, Alterman not only 
directly implicates a complaisant press in presidential deception, but 
illustrates how “both sides,” false equivalence–fetishizing journalism 
set the conditions for the inevitable arrival of someone like Trump to 
the highest elected office in the land.

Alterman briefly zeroes in on the executive editor of the *New York 
Times,* Dean Baquet, at the end of the book, as an exemplar of the timid 
and defensive crouch adopted by so many mainstream editorial mastheads. 
On multiple occasions in the era of Trump, Baquet has defended his 
newspaper’s stubborn refusal to use the words “lie” or “lying” when 
covering this president’s onslaught of willful disinformation, except in 
the most extremely egregious cases (*New York Times*, 6/25/18) . In an 
online discussion with readers, Baquet explained his journalistic worldview:

    Most politicians obfuscate or exaggerate at times. But I wouldn’t
    use the word “lie” in a news story in cases like that. I don’t think
    we should use that word every day in the *New York Times*.

This goes beyond normalizing lies to a kind of learned helplessness 
about them, and it’s tantamount to unilateral surrender when faced with 
a president who shows no compunction about lying on a daily, hourly or 
even minute-by-minute basis. (One notable exception to Baquet’s 
dare-not-call-them-lies rule came right after the 2016 election, when 
Trump repeatedly claimed to have been cheated out of a popular vote 
majority by illegal voting—*New York Times*, 1/23/17—which foreshadowed 
Trump’s ongoing propaganda campaign that the 2020 version will be rife 
with electoral fraud as well.) Ironically, this insistence on eliding or 
excusing lies whenever possible, and employing tortured euphemisms 
instead, is now /de rigueur/ among the very reporters and editors who 
are exposed to Trump’s lies the most—among them, the *Times*’ own White 
House correspondent.

But before /Lying in State/ begins its deeply researched, historical 
review of presidential lying (and journalistic fecklessness) through the 
decades, it establishes an instructive, if cheeky, taxonomy of lying, 
borrowing from the work of some well-known philosophers. The first among 
this dubious group is Thomas Carson’s “bald-faced lies,” statements that 
both the liar and his or her intended audience implicitly understand to 
be untrue: think Trump’s transparently phony, “Mexico will pay for the 
border wall” applause line. Another subspecies: Harry Frankfurt’s 
not-so-subtly named “bullshit,” which defines anything that is obviously 
unprovable or displays an utter disregard for reality, such as Trump’s 
absurd, much-evidence-to-the-contrary boast that he is “the least racist 
person in the world,” or his nonsense assertion that the noise from 
windmills causes cancer.

The final two examples come from Jürgen Habermas, who highlights the 
sins of misinformation and disinformation, the latter differing from the 
former by its clear intent to deceive. Compare Trump’s weeks-long 
touting of hydroxychloroquine as a potential “game changer” for treating 
Covid-19, which Trump quite likely might actually believe, versus his 
more recent, knowingly baseless claim that mail-in voting is rife with 
fraud and yet is somehow functionally different than absentee voting, 
which he simultaneously deems perfectly acceptable.

The Washington Post The Washington Post

As those easily provided examples suggest, the current president really 
is /sui generis/ when it comes to the breadth and depth of his 
presidential lies—having now made more than 20,000 “false or misleading 
claims” since his inauguration, according to the *Washington Post*’s 
factchecker (7/13/20). Trump’s tsunami of lies, often in service of 
covering up his thoroughly corrupt conduct, doubtless represents a 
unique threat to the American democracy—as the book’s subtitle warns. 
Yet the most valuable lesson from /Lying in State/ comes from connecting 
Trump’s rampant trampling of the truth to the same patterns and motives 
as his many prevaricating predecessors.

This corrosive through-line predates both the presidency and the nation 
itself, and traces back to the arrival of the first slave ship to our 
shores in 1619, as Alterman explains:

    The racist assumptions underlying the ideology of white supremacy
    have remained, for the most part, just below the surface of American
    political life. Yet these beliefs have profoundly contradicted
    Americans’ understanding of themselves and their professed belief
    that “all men are created equal.” Rather than confront this
    contradiction, American presidents have felt it necessary to elide
    it with lies.

As the reader proceeds through the book’s damning history, this 
disconnect rides alongside, haunting our nation’s presidential decisions 
time and again. For the first 100 years, it is the Constitution’s 
“original sin” of slavery, and its racist companion, a relentlessly 
expanisionist Manifest Destiny, that are the primary drivers of the 
biggest lies coming from the White House. To preserve both of these 
policies, presidents from Thomas Jefferson to William McKinley routinely 
chose to deceive the public about their true intentions—and their 
consequences—while subjugating and killing untold numbers of peoples in 
forced migrations, and conducting wars of conquest across the continent 
and then further overseas.

After the turn of the 20th century, these two motivations to lie 
metastasized into protecting both the Jim Crow laws that were the 
systemically racist progeny of slavery, and the enormous fig leaf of 
“national security” necessitated by a now openly zealous imperialism. 
Ironically, though President Woodrow Wilson was instrumental in this 
pivot, Alterman doesn’t spot any specific examples of Wilson personally 
lying to the American public. (The same cannot be said for his wife, 
however, who, in a shockingly bold deception, covered up a massive 
stroke that completely incapacitated Wilson, while she effectively ran 
the country and most likely forged his signature on Prohibition 
legislation.)

The USS Maddox, which Lyndon Johnson lied about being attacked by North 
Vietname in the Gulf of Tonkin. The USS Maddox, which Lyndon Johnson 
lied about being attacked by North Vietname in the Gulf of Tonkin.

With World War II and the sprawling national security apparatus that 
followed it in the Cold War era, presidential lies jumped by orders of 
magnitude. Korea, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Vietnam, Watergate, 
Iran/Contra: All of these major historical events were accompanied by, 
if not actually founded upon, a raft of official lies of commission and 
omission. And for every well-known example, the book dredges up just as 
many sordid White House lies about more obscure US foreign policy 
abuses, in places like Guatemala, El Salvador, Iran, Angola and Chile.

All of this past was prologue, then, to bring us to the White House 
doorstep of the 45th president. When Donald Trump re-appears in the 
book, after a grim 250 pages of presidential deceit, his willingness to 
distort reality to advance his racism, xenophobia, corruption, 
militarism and gross personal misconduct seems less of a shock to the 
political system and more like a natural evolution. Trump, in other 
words, is the toxic by-product of 400 years of corrosive American 
self-deception, helped along by a sclerotic press corps that meekly 
absorbs lies rather than challenges them.

Our already frail democracy, beset by what the book’s final chapter 
rightly sums up as “System Overload,” faces a momentous turning point in 
2020. And we can’t say we haven’t been warned. Yale history professor 
Timothy Snyder, in a *Vox* discussion (5/22/17) of his powerfully 
prescient 2017 book, /On Tyranny/, limned how a relentless assault on 
the truth creates a slippery slope that can threaten the very 
foundations of a nation and the freedom of its people:

    The way it works is that you first just lie a lot. You fill up the
    public space with things that aren’t true, as Trump has obviously
    done. Next you say, “It’s not me who lies; it’s the crooked
    journalists. They’re the ones who spread the fake news.” Then the
    third step, if this works, is that everybody shrugs their shoulders
    and says, “Well, we don’t really know who to trust; therefore, we’ll
    trust whoever we feel like trusting.” In that situation…
    authoritarianism wins.

But even if the country expels Trump from the White House this November, 
the dangerous precedents he has set and the distortion field of 
dishonesty he has created may well remain. It will not be enough to 
simply return to “normal”; the boundaries of where official deception 
can travel have now been pushed too far for that, Alterman notes.

Like the virus that is currently ravaging our republic, Trump is not 
something that we must aspire to merely survive. Not if our democracy is 
to be truly restored to health. Instead, both the American people and 
the press will have to confront some hard, uncomfortable truths about 
our past and the lies we have told ourselves. Only then will we have 
begun to inoculate ourselves against the next president’s lies.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

/Featured image: An audioanimatronic Donald Trump with previous 
presidents at Disney’s Hall of Presidents./


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