Three versions of Donald

This morning’s very interesting discussion of trans issues in Trumpworld inspired me to make some edits to one chapter of The Triumph of Stupidity (getting stronger every day):

It has always been the case that asking whether Trump believes what he says is true is like asking if a science fiction novel set thousands of years into the future is historically accurate.  It’s a category error.  Trump doesn’t try to tell the truth and he, generally speaking, doesn’t lie, because both of those acts (attempting to make truthful or false statements) require a level of mental coherence that he has no interest in attempting to achieve.  Trump is what C.S. Lewis describes in his biography of a posh private English school when he says a certain boy was known as a “rattle,” in that he had no interest in whether what he was saying was true or false, he just said whatever seemed advantageous or amusing to say at the moment, with no regard for its potential truth or falsehood.

But as Trump ages, bullshit in this technical sense seems to be giving way gradually to a combination of pure stupidity and creeping dementia.  Trump’s insane ranting about the California wildfires wasn’t, I suspect, some self-conscious bit of demagogic manipulation:  Trump believed what he was saying because what has become the overwhelmingly central fact about the man, more than all the and corruption and sheer evil, is that he is now, comprehensively, a demented idiot.  What, we might well wonder, happens when he really does order the Air Force to nuke a hurricane?

Trump’s original Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, painted a grim enough picture what Trump was like eight years ago now (Trump fired Tillerson in the spring of 2018).  Even back then, Tillerson said, Trump could not hold a sustained conversation, or focus on more than two or three points during a meeting.

“If I could put a photo or a picture in front of him, or a map or a piece of paper that had two big bullet points on it, he would focus on that, and I could build on that,” Tillerson said in 2021.  “Just sitting and trying to have a conversation as you and I are having just doesn’t work.”

And things seem to have gotten a good deal worse since then.

Consider this example from the fall 2024 presidential campaign.   At a rally in Wisconsin, Trump asked his supporters to consider the implications of the fact that schoolchildren were being subjected to gender transition surgery by their schools, without parental knowledge, let alone consent:

Can you imagine you’re a parent and your son leaves the house and you say, ‘Jimmy, I love you so much, go have a good day in school,’ and your son comes back with a brutal operation? Can you even imagine this? What the hell is wrong with our country?

The previous weekend, at a Moms for Liberty event, Trump had been asked by one of the group’s co-founders how he would deal with the “explosion in the number of children who identify as transgender.”  Trump replied:  “Your kid goes to school and comes home a few days later with an operation.  The school decides what’s going to happen with your child.”

Asked by one of the group’s co-founders how he would address the “explosion in the number of children who identify as transgender,” Trump said: “Your kid goes to school and comes home a few days later with an operation. The school decides what’s going to happen with your child.”

I can imagine three distinct explanations – three versions of Donald as it were – for why Trump would be claiming that children in contemporary America are subjected to gender transition surgery by their schools without parental knowledge.

One version could be called Savvy Trump: Savvy Trump knows these statements are lies, but he is so contemptuous of his supporters that he repeats them anyway, because he believes a lot of them will believe it, or at least want to believe it, and he is consciously lying because he sees it as in his interest to do so.

On the other hand we have the possibility that these statements represent Bullshit Trump.  Bullshit Trump has no actual view on whether these claims are true or not, because he’s a pure bullshitter in Harry Frankfurt’s sense of the term, i.e., someone who isn’t a liar, because a liar has to believe that X is the case, in order to convince you that X is not the case. That is a liar knows or thinks he knows the truth about something, and asserts the contrary. A bullshitter, by contrast, doesn’t care at all about whether what he’s saying is true or not and doesn’t spend any mental energy on having an opinion on that. He says something because he thinks it’s to his advantage to assert it, and is completely indifferent to whether it’s true or not. Frankfurt’s point is that it’s necessary to care about the truth in order to lie about it, but a bullshitter simply doesn’t care, so he’s not lying in this technical sense of the term.

Finally, we have Stupid Trump: Stupid Trump believes these claims are true, because he’s a profoundly stupid man, and part of his stupidity is believing such claims are true because he wants them to be true.  In other words, his actual beliefs on the matter are an example of extreme confirmation bias.

I don’t doubt that on certain occasions Trump is Savvy Trump, while on others he is Bullshit Trump, and on yet other occasions he is Stupid Trump. I do suspect that the percentage of time that he’s in each of these categories has been shifting rapidly toward the Stupid rather than Savvy Trump, although Bullshit Trump probably remains his dominant mode of cognition.  Presented with these possibilities, one veteran Trump watcher suggested to me that the statements about gender transition surgeries at school were straddling what was becoming the increasingly blurry line between Bullshit Trump and Stupid Trump.  One big part of Stupid Trump, he pointed out, is that he’s very susceptible to claims from people he trusts. Thus if one of the unhinged fanatics who has access to him tells him these things are happening, he’s then inclined to believe it.  But, he noted, “this is also part of being a bullshitter.”  What some random person told him is more valid than a scientific study of the issue.

My friend Steve the Weather Scientist saw this and added the following interpretation, which I think is more subtle and accurate than the pure bullshit definition:

A species of BS is salesman BS. He envisions scenarios, and they become real in the moment, or real enough. The schools doing operations in the middle of the day without parents knowledge. The buses of illegal voters coming in and voting seven times. The guy whose TV keeps going out because the wind stops blowing. The sir stories of big strong men with tears in their eyes (or who want to kiss him all over in the latest alarming versions). It’s weak to say “I’ve heard rumors of Democrats with eleven ballots in their hands.” Stronger to say “You see these Democrats, they’ve got eleven ballots in their hands, it’s unbelievable.” So he does that.

If pressed (in some imaginary scenario where he can’t walk away or filibuster), he might admit that he’s simplifying or exaggerating, but would immediately say hey, that’s salesmanship. Salesmanship isn’t lying, it’s shading to make the case. He’d say his versions aren’t far off reality, and if we let the radical left have their way, they’d be real soon enough. To him they’re true like a myth is true (ht Craig), true on a higher level. That’s the art of a true bullshitter, the one who semi-convinces himself in order to convince you that the Biloxi timeshare is going to pay off big. The standard definition, not caring about the truth at all, doesn’t quite capture it.