Donald Trump is a Liar, but he’s not a Hypocrite
A liar says “X is true” when they know “X is false” or vice versa.
A hypocrite casts shame and intense moral condemnation upon people for engaging in behavior in which they themselves engage behind closed doors.
People dislike liars but they absolutely loathe hypocrites
In a research paper titled “Why Do We Hate Hypocrites?”, the Yale psychologist Jillian Jordan posed a hypothetical where a competitive swimmer named Jason announces that he doesn’t use performance enhancing drugs. Participants in the study were asked to rate how likely it is that Jason actually does use PED’s. In other words, that Jason is lying. In a separate variation of the story Jason finds out that a teammate is caught using PED’s. Jason asserts moral condemnation upon the teammate publically and rails against the use of PED’s generally. Participants presented with this version of the story were also asked to rate how likely it is that Jason uses PED’s
You may have guessed that participants rate the likelihood that Jason uses PED’s to be much lower in the 2nd variation. The participants are then asked to react to the news that Jason does in fact use PED’s. People react more negatively to the hypocritical version of Jason than the lying version of Jason.
“One potential explanation: hypocrites are actually more misleading than liars, because their condemnation is perceived as such a strong signal that they personally behave morally.”
Jordan and her colleagues contend that the signal of the hypocrite is stronger. Thus, when it is revealed to be a false signal it is a deeper violation of important social norms which depend on trust. The false signal of the direct denial (the lie) is damaging but the stronger false signal of hypocrisy brings out the pitchforks and the penalty is severe.
Before I bring my argument to the curious case of Donald Trump, I want to make it clear that Donald Trump is a serial liar. From the famous Alabama sharpie, to having a favorite Bible verse, to claiming that windmill noise causes cancer, there is no shortage of ever-expanding lists of Trump’s lies. I also want to admit that I’ll be doing a bit of arm-chair psychology to dispel the impulse to also call Trump a hypocrite. All the usual caveats that this may be off the mark should be kept in mind by the reader but I think I’m onto something. I aim to convince you that Donald Trump’s “super power” is a likely inadvertent exploitation of the imbalance between the outsized “social hatred” for hypocrites compared to the “social dislike” for liars.
David Frum summed up this dynamic perfectly with the observation, “Trump is their murder weapon.”
A friend of mine, Seth Stephens-Davidowitz wrote a fantastic book entitled Everybody Lies. Seth had access to mountains of data from Google searches, dating sites, pornography sites, facebook, and more. The book draws upon a notion that people tend to use their Google search bar much more honestly than just about anywhere else in life including anonymous surveys, real relationships, and especially their online social platforms. He refers to the Google search bar as a kind of “digital truth serum.”
Dipping into that data well produces some amusing insights which could be fodder for date-night trivia like the disparity between the percentage of people who say they’ve read a whole book or article versus the data which reveals how many actually have completed it, or the amount of sex that men say they are having versus the revealed reality through condom purchase data, or the truth that the romantic dream vacation to Fiji you witnessed on Instagram was littered with Google searches like “Why won’t my wife have sex with me?” or “How do I tell if my husband is cheating?”
Some of the insights are heavy and powerful like the spike in internet searches for “how to give myself an abortion” in areas where the procedures are banned or the correlation between searches for “why did Daddy hit me?” in areas where the 2008 recession hit the hardest. There are also answers to questions such as “what do people commonly search for before a suicide attempt?” This kind of data often does not show up anywhere else and is crying out for actionable attention.
The pornography data is also telling. I probably don’t need to warn you that the frequency of searches for “depraved”, “taboo”, or even “disturbing” material is much higher than many of us wish to know.
There is a common response to hearing that kind of data to get depressed after getting a glimpse at the skeletons in all the closets behind the friendly smiles at the grocery store. But there is a much more hopeful and encouraging lens through which to see this data. It would be a response that sounds something like, “Oh hey, I guess I’m not the only one struggling with that!” There is an opportunity for all of us to step down off our high moral horses for a minute and realize the dirt is where everyone has really been all along.
To picture the liar vs hypocrite distinction imagine a discussion at a dinner party when the topic of literature comes up. A liar would say “I read all of Moby Dick and especially loved the end” while the truth (and the data on their Kindle) would reflect that they actually bailed a quarter of the way through. But a hypocrite at the table would shame and confidently morally condemn people who pretend to finish books while their data would reveal the same exact thing.
There is a way to understand the lessons of Stephens-Davidowitz’s book to be “The liar is kind of a crummy person, but I guess lying about that kind of thing is really common. And hey, I think I can admit that I do that too sometimes.” If the liar insists that he’s read all of Moby Dick and continues to tell much more consequential lies then we get pretty upset. We might stop trusting this person or even cut off the friendship. As Jillian Jordan reminds us, this is a kind of false signal which corrupts social cooperation.
So, why don’t many people seem to really care that Donald Trump lies? Why don’t we all just cut him off? (Please, don’t ask him if he’s read all of Moby Dick). My theory is that he is not perceived to be a hypocrite by his base. In fact, he calls out hypocrites, constantly reminding people that there is a bigger enemy in the room. This is why he never apologizes when called out for lying but instead insists that the source of the moral condemnation he is receiving has the same transgression lurking behind their impassioned speeches. This charge is often a lie in itself, but not always. He is currently attempting to pull this same trick with the Biden and Ukraine issue.
This “expose the hypocrite” tactic is rendered at the level of the “culture wars” and the conversation between coastal elites and non-cosmopolitan America. Consider Hollywood, a frequent target of and by Donald Trump and especially Don Jr.
Hollywood famously loves to shame and morally condemn all kinds of people. It’s often very emotional and slick. Sometimes it’s on screen and sometimes it’s on award stages. Nowadays, a lot of it is mirrored on Twitter. But are the moralizers in Hollywood the hypocrites at the table? What would the data reveal about the amount of books which they’ve really finished or if they ever laugh at comedy that uses stereotypes. Maybe they even watch a little not-so-kosher pornography or perhaps they really enjoy something as “unsophisticated” as pro-wrestling or NASCAR. Maybe they even sneak in a Reese’s peanut butter cup or two inbetween the perfect Instagram yoga poses.
Again, my message here is to emphasize that lying about those things, while perhaps kind of crummy, is insanely common. If we’d stop pretending that it’s not, maybe we could laugh at ourselves a little more, biases, vices, impulses and all. Maybe we’d even start to address them a little better. Comedians like Dave Chappelle and Bill Burr seem to have their finger on this point at the moment and are finding huge audiences who are dying to laugh in public again
But much of America (you know who I am talking about here) is tired of being shamed and lectured about their diets, lifestyles, interests, and selfish choices by people they suspect don’t have such saintly Google histories either. One example comes from Stephens-Davidowitz’s work which shows that Google searches for "nigger" tend to be just as high in areas with high Republican populations as areas with high Democratic populations.
There is a common misperception about Donald Trump where people suggest that there is severe cognitive dissonance at play with his supporters’ ire towards the “coastal urban elite” and a profile of Donald Trump that seems to be squarely in that same category as a big city trust fund baby. But the thing is, Donald Trump is not in that cultural tribe. He could never pull off the kind of fakery which is required to pass as one of them, though he tried desperately.
Imagine a rooftop party on the Upper West Side in the early 90’s. It’s just down the street from the Metropolitan Ballet. You could even be imagining one of Trump’s properties.
The wealthy and powerful from the fashion and political worlds are hobnobbing around in expensive clothes discussing “important” topics and sipping wine. In walks Donald Trump with his new girlfriend to try to make conversation with a cluster of guests. Perhaps the first question lobbed his way would be “Donald, this property is so great, right next to the Ballet! Have you caught the new season yet? The new choreographer is fantastic isn’t he?”
However awkwardly the next 2 minutes play out in your head, you can almost hear the comments whispered after Donald wanders off. “I heard he actually watches Pro Wrestling.” “Did you see his new girlfriend? I wonder where she bought those!” “And what on Earth is going on with his hair?”
I think it still burns Donald that he was never “really” accepted in those circles by failing to perform the necessary displays of taste, nuance, and intelligence. I think it also bothers him (or at least it used to) to know that he eventually found a swath of fellow “cultural party rejects” who now keep his approval rating afloat. This was never the crowd he was hoping to impress but perhaps their embrace has blossomed into a mutual love affair or maybe he is still seething with bitterness deep down and trying to convince himself this is where the “real party” was all along.
This reluctant romance can be tracked by his relationship with WWE. His casinos hosted Wrestlemania IV and V in 1988 and 1989. Trump sat with a wide grin on the sidelines in 1988 but didn’t step into character (as himself) until 2007 when he ended up shaving Vince McMahan’s head and body slamming men in tights. This collective psychology was nakedly on display when Trump departed from the teleprompter during a rally in Ohio in 2018 to declare that, “I became president and they (the elite) didn’t. Meaning you became president!”
His response to my imagined question about the new choreographer at the ballet would surely have been some lie about how much he’s enjoying the new season while having not seen a single performance. Maybe he would reference some other ballet term that he had heard that didn’t actually fit just to try to pull off the illusion of sophistication. Donald Trump is a liar.
But again, as Stephens-Davidowitz points out, “everybody” lies about that kind of thing. That kind of lie is almost forgivable with a kind of wink that leans in and whispers, “Yeah, the 129th Chapter of Mobdy Dick was my favorite part too.” But what the Trump base revels in together now is knowing that the symbolic rooftop party is full of hypocrites and the data (if we could see it) would reveal that they sneak “instant-karma bodyslam” youtube clips on their phones during the Ballet intermission, cheat on their wives with the hot young neighbor, take dirty money, attended a few “late night private hotel casting couches” to get ahead in film or music, and might secretly wish they had a girlfriend who looked a little like Donald’s. And now Trump can call them all out because he’s given up on being accepted.
If Donald Trump ever is seen as trying to moralize or shame others you can almost sense the disingenuousness of it all. It’s a trap to be called out every time. This is otherwise known as the art of trolling. If there is any kind of “genius skill” that can be said that Trump possesses, it would be this one. Criticise Obama for golfing too much then do the exact same thing but never apologize or explain it when you are called out for it? Parade around declaring the virtues of “American made products” while selling TRUMP 2020 campaign posters which were made in China? You can just see Trump’s troll face now. It’s almost like the initial criticism was actually intended to call out the kind of saintly hero worship which people adorned upon Obama as being a lie. ‘He’s just like the rest of us slobs when the cameras aren’t rolling’ or at least Trump wants to believe that.
Within the insane whirlwind of the Trump presidency, there was one moment that sticks out as perfectly illustrative of my thesis. It was an answer to a question during a time when the newscycle was dominated by the murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi by Mohammad Bin Salman Al Saud and the Saudi regime.
The horror and outrage was switched on and the microphones were out. They ended up pointing at Donald Trump and coalescing around appropriate moralizing and shaming questions like “How can you associate with this brutal authoritarian?” These questions were met with all kinds of appalling indifference and hand waving which rightfully sent the pundits into a fervor about Trump’s dictatorial fetish. But then the real question came.
“Are you going to move forward with the arms deal with Saudi Arabia?”
Before I remind you of his answer, it should be noted that the US’s relationship with Saudi Arabia is a topic for fierce debate. On paper, and in practice, Saudi Arabia’s activity and way of life is so antithetical to “American” ideals that one wonders why we consider them anything like an ally and don’t sever all ties. There are two general paths to wander down when trying to answer the reporter’s question. The first path is to speak about a kind of “global stability and security involving complicated alliances including the Israel dynamic which depends on our relationship with the kingdom remaining intact.” This path allows the speaker to do a kind of balancing act where he can perform an amount of moral condemnation and head shaking while pretending to not know that the reporter asked a “yes or no” question.
The other path is a much simpler one. It is almost so obvious it need not be mentioned. It is to point out that “they have oil and money.” Duh.
For any politician to try to answer this reporter’s question from Reagan through HW Bush, Clinton, W Bush, and Obama there was only one path to be taken out loud. The answer would be a flurry of moral condemnation and concern mixed with a nod towards the complex strategic relationships in the Middle East and a dedication to working on strengthening the relationship. In other words, the first path, a kind of “noble lie”.
Here is how Trump answered the reporter: “They’re spending 110 billion dollars purchasing military equipment and other things. If we don’t sell it to them, they’ll say ‘Well, thank you very much. We’ll buy it from Russia.’ or ‘Thank you very much. We’ll buy it from China.’ That doesn’t help us. Not when it comes to jobs and not when it comes to our companies losing out on that work.”
I remember watching that and thinking “Wait, he can just… say that? Can he?”
After a clarifying question came about whether he would oppose sanctions on Saudi Arabia as a response to the killing, he was even more plain. “I would not be in favor of stopping a country from spending 110 billion dollars, which is an all-time record, and letting Russia have that money and letting China have that money.”
Yeah, he was just saying it. And even more shocking, he has a number. It was almost like realizing that Trump is such a liar that he doesn’t know what he’s “supposed” to lie. Here is the full clip.
Now, most of us don’t deal with considerations like the murder of a journalist weighed against 110 billion dollars in our everyday lives. But at the heart of his response was a kind of “elephant in the room” honesty that struck me. He could have just as easily answered with, “Hell yeah, I’m taking the money. Wouldn’t you?”
This boils down to the most basic and most common moral decision of “the ends justify the means.” These moral tests take comically sinister forms in psychology labs with situations such as “Would you give a random stranger on the other side of the wall a small electric shock that will only hurt a little for $10?...$100?... $1,000?... $10,000? How about if they aren’t even on the other side of the wall but the other side of the world and it will hurt less than a flea bite?”
Of course, when you raise the stakes from a harmless electric shock or bug bite to an actual killing I hope you would only be remotely tempted with several more zeros. And if you loudly protest that there is no amount of zeros which would ever tempt you and that anyone who was should be eternally shamed, it would be best to remember the lessons in Everybody Lies and be prepared to cast shame on Obama, Clinton, W Bush and everyone else who danced down the first path on the Saudi alliance question countless times. World politics is messy and 110,000,000,000 dollars and thousands of American manufacturing jobs is a lot of real and symbolic zeroes.
We all make small selfish decisions every day: passing cars in the turn-only lane because the car that you’ll cut off up ahead won’t know that it was intentional, staying silent when you notice that the cashier forgot to ring up an item in your bag, or fudging an hour or two on your employee timecard. When the decision involves your family the selfishness becomes even easier to justify. What would you do to get your kids a better chance at a top school? Forget the obvious direct payments to corrupt admission officials that make the news. Consider the more practical kind of utilitarian math which many of us face every day. Would you take a high paying advertising contract job for a cigarette company which might be a tad unethical and unclean if that money would pay for a year of your child’s education? You sure about that?
A whole bunch of people may hear Trump’s answer about the Saudi arms deal and think to themselves, “Hell, I’d take the money too. I take way less than that every day.” If someone claims the opposite when the data shows otherwise they’d fit my liar definition. In a sense, they’d be like all those millions of final chapter of Moby Dick “readers” out there. Remember, that describes pretty much everyone it turns out. If that’s you right now, don’t sweat it too hard.
But many don’t stop there.
The cancel-culture mobs come for prominent figures like comedians, politicians, journalists, actors, musicians, and unremarkable people in their own social circles and communities. They operate with a kind of moral purity while loudly signaling that they “never take the dirty money” and never will. They’re often championed by prominent celebrity voices buoyed by hoards of young idealists who haven’t yet had to weigh many difficult common life choices which may one day reveal that the price they’d take to “make a quick exception” to their cherished moral principles may be lower than they now insist.
The more well positioned figures build a crusade of shaming and condemnation complete with laughter and satire shows with carefully chosen targets to quiet the guilty rattling of skeleton bones in their closets made up of unread final chapters of Moby Dick, dirty deeds performed for money or access, and secret envy of the playboy lifestyle.
Trump supporters like to repeat the refrain that “they really hate politicians and Donald Trump is not a politician.” I think what they mean when they say “politician” is “hypocrite.” They also love “owning the libs.” This is the battle cry of the “hypocrites getting their comeuppance.”
Consider again, the question about the Saudi arms deal. But this time pretend a “politician” is answering it. You can imagine what it sounds like or just go back and listen to answers that Obama gave which were elegant and full of phrases about “cooperating on countering terrorism”, “preventing Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon”, and “continuing to deepen our coopration on issues like education, clean energy, science, and climate change…” You get the idea, he took the usual first path answer while simultaneously quietly shaking hands and making a 60 billion dollar arms deal with deadly Saudi Arabian leadership.
Given Stephens-Davidowitz data about how many people finish articles it is unlikely that many are still reading. But if you are, there is one important final thing to mention. None of this essay is meant to defend Trump or his presidency. I consider the entire Trump phenomenon to be a disaster inflicting long lasting damage. The situation we have found ourselves in as a nation where the psychology of “hypocrite resentment” rules the day at the cost of crowning a clueless liar is severely unhealthy and dangerous.
If you analogize complex global decisions like Saudi arms deals down to the daily moral dilemmas we all face when we participate in harm-causing “means” for what we convince ourselves are justified “ends” like the impure jobs we work to put food on the table and the small corners we cut for selfish reasons you begin to see the deeper relatable picture. Perhaps you will start to translate the “Trump tells it like it is” endorsement from his base to something more like what I hear which is “Trump is a liar, but so am I and so is everybody else.”
Oh and about that Saudi arms deal that Trump made. It hasn’t earned anywhere close to the 110 billion dollar amount he promised. Trump is a liar, but he’s not a hypocrite.