On Lies: Trump Versus The Establishment

On Trump's "Lies"

In an exchange on X yesterday, liberal journalist Jesse Singal argued that no political figure lied as much as Donald Trump. 

Tablet Magazine's Park MacDougald wrote a brilliant post in response, that really nailed the difference between Trump's exaggerations and the Establishment's disastrous inversions of reality. I've posted it in full below. Following that, we'll close with a contrarian idea for Friday the 13th: buying a couple of (proverbial) lottery tickets. 

 [emphasis mine]

On Lies: Trump Versus The Dem Establishment

My honest answer to this, which I hear a lot (not picking on Jesse), is that Trump bullshits—he exaggerates, or garbles details of, things that are basically true, and tends to “lie” mostly when it concerns his personal honor (crowd size, sleeping with the porn star, etc).

Harris, but the Dem apparatus more broadly (for which she’s only a cipher), tends instead to weave technically true statements together into a narrative that is not merely false but egregiously so, often approaching a near-perfect inversion of reality. The result is a hall of mirrors world in which Dem bullshit is laundered through and ratified by society’s sense-making institutions and becomes a sort of distributed knowledge or ‘common sense’ among elites such that no one person or node in the network ever has to bear personal responsibility for the falsehood—they didn’t come up with it, it was reported in the Times or put out by the CDC or American Association of Pediatrics or leaked by sources in the intelligence community, who “requested anonymity to discuss sensitive matters.”

It’s sort of like the pre-crash real estate market or the U.S. mission in Afghanistan—it’s not, generally speaking, that the individual bankers or generals are liars or criminals (though some are), it’s that the project they are working in service of is completely fake, and even the true things they say are ultimately just messaging in service of the fakery. It’s a Big Lie, not “lies,” though we get plenty of lies too (look at Adam Schiff).

Ironically, given Jesse’s own reporting, the field of “youth gender medicine” is a great example of how this works. The Democratic Party, most Democratic politicians, all of the relevant medical associations, vast majority of the respectable press—all were in agreement for years that “the science” showed, contrary to the wisdom of all of human history, that it was “medically necessary” to start surgically altering the bodies of confused teenagers. They had studies showing it! Except it was all fake, and if you were literally too stupid to read the studies, you probably had a more realistic view of the matter than the experts. Ultimately it gets too absurd to be sustained and they beat a retreat, but even that is just a tactical retreat to preserve the legitimacy of the machine that created the Big Lie in the first place, and make sure that nobody important or connected is ever held accountable.

“Come on, man, you’re still talking about (GWOT/Russiagate/censorship/COVID/abolish the police/trans) in 2024? We’ve moved on!”

So, that, at scale, for everything—immigration, foreign policy, economics, education, race relations, etc.

Trump's Truth Versus The Big Lie

A great example of a Big Lie that Park referred to there was the pre-Trump GOP's claims about George W. Bush, that invading Iraq was the right decision and that W. "kept us safe". Trump demolished both lies, once and for all, in this classic exchange with Jeb Bush during the South Carolina debate in 2016. 

When Jeb trotted out the line, "My brother kept us safe", Trump pointed out that 9/11 happened on George W. Bush's watch. 

Trying To Make Friday The 13th Our Lucky Day

In the Portfolio Armor trading Substack, we've got two options trades teed-up on sub-$5 stocks that could make big moves over the next several months. One is a turnaround story on a name most investors have left for dead, and the other is a fast-growing, debt-free small cap with operations in both crypto and AI. 

I'll add a link to our trade alert to the image above later today, but if you'd like a heads up as soon as that trade alert goes out, you can subscribe to our trading Substack/occasional email list below. 

If you'd like to stay in touch 

You can follow Park MacDougald on X here, and check out his Substack here. 

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