A few days ago, Trump spokeswoman Sarah Sanders felt compelled to tell the press and the world that “The President is not a liar.” Sanders, like everyone else, obviously knows better, so that statement itself was a lie.
Trump’s entire career can be viewed as a rebuke to Kantian ethics. The questions for today are:
- What are the origins of his attitudes towards spoken truth?
- What purposes do his lies serve?
- What impacts do they have on the US government as a whole?
My responses are as follows:
- His father must have taught him at an early age that the world was a sort of Social Darwinian dystopia, and that anyone who believes in concepts like truth and the law is just a sucker. The powerful rule, and the weak and foolish drool.
- Some of his lies, like most lies, are intended to deceive. Others are an attempt to bind his supporters closer to him. Most of them are just projections of power and ego.
- Consider this example: Jim Mattis recently gave a speech to our Asian allies in Singapore in which he indicated that the Trump Administration wanted to maintain a rules-based international system and that Trump would never trade their vital interests for Chinese assistance with North Korea. No one doubts that Mattis himself agrees with those propositions, but they fly directly in the face of Trump’s behavior, which makes Mattis look like a fool or a liar. This goes on every day and damages the credibility of both our country and all of its individual agents.