America’s Bottomley

Trump is boasting about how he used his pardon powers to free low-level criminals. He brings up a woman, jailed on a drug dealing charge, that he pardoned. Baier reminds him that under the policy Trump is touting, wherein he would execute drug dealers, this woman would have been killed.

It is a remarkable moment. For a split second the Fool is caught in his folly, and the gears freeze. Even Brett Baier has to laugh.

But what I see in this clip, more than Trump’s childish policy prescriptions, is one of the keys to the man’s success. How quickly the master Bullshitter comes up with, not one, not two, but three half-coherent responses. Responses graded on a bullshit scale of course. The bar is low.

But Trump is not wooing the genius vote. All he needs is to keep his base bamboozled. And I’m struck, watching this clip, at how quickly the stunned hamsters on the wheels in his brain recover and start spinning even faster than before. How manically the gibbons hurl bananas at the wall to see what might stick. And before you can say, Look out for the bull, you’re covered in fresh bullshit.

Would depend on the degree. Not retroactive. My policy would have scared her off. And his base goes, yeah. Makes sense to me. And he lives to play another day.

You almost have to admire it. It gets him from point A to point B. He never gets bogged down in the details or logic of point A. There’s always a point B and then a point C. And if you get to those points quickly enough, no one remembers point A.

Trump lives his life in five- to ten-minute increments. Whatever bullshit gets him through the next ten minutes. Hell, the next ten seconds. He’ll have new bullshit to spew if/when he makes it through the next ten. Trump family motto. “Trust the Bullshit.”

I’ve mentioned philosopher Harry Frankfurt’s chapbook On Bullshit before. As Frankfurt argues, a liar is often a very clever person with a genuine connection to the truth. A liar knows what the truth is and deliberately tells you an untruth in order to steer you away from the truth. Liars are likely too smart to lie about something too easily disproved. They don’t want to get caught.

But a bullshit artist has no connection to the truth at all. The truth is simply whatever they desire it to be in the moment. The bullshit artist may or may not actually believe what they are saying. It hardly matters to them. In fact, sometimes they might actually speak the truth quite by accident. Trump is a bullshit artist. Perhaps the greatest we’ve ever seen in public life in this country. You see this in the fact that he is incapable, apparently, of thinking beyond the moment. A very dangerous trait for a leader by the way. One attribute humans, indeed all higher order animals, have evolved in order to survive is the ability to make decisions based on future outcomes. You see this knack in the squirrel that starts across the road, sees the oncoming car, hesitates, then sprints back to safety. Basic survival. How will this act affect my future?

Trump, as with all accomplished bullshitters, seems to be a model of devolution. Whatever bullshit is required in the moment to let him avoid facing his own shortcomings shapes the words that come out of his mouth.

I first really wrapped my head around this, rather late I admit, during the now infamous cruise ship incident from March of 2020. Trump wanted to keep the cruise ship filled with Americans infected with Covid off-shore because he didn’t want “his numbers” to go up that day.

Now any human with a modicum of the kind of adaptive intelligence required to survive on this planet knows that whatever the numbers might be on that day, in a pandemic those numbers will matter not one whit tomorrow, or next week, or next month. Nobody will remember or even care what the numbers were that day. So even the dullest human being would know a leader would be judged by the numbers that were coming. Numbers that eventually crossed one million.

But for the bullshit artist the only imperative is what’s needed now. And “truth” is whatever gets one “successfully,” as in with the least loss of face, through the next moment. Only the numbers of that day would get Trump to his pillow at night with the happy dream that all was well with the world.

What was remarkable in the Bret Baier interview was that for a split second the bullshit stopped. The master bullshitter froze. But what I find even more remarkable is how quickly the bullshitter’s intestinal engine began churning anew.

It really doesn’t even matter if he doesn’t quite make it through unscathed. As long as he makes it through. And, so far, he’s always made it through.

The problem for the bullshitter, in this case at least, is that he rose far above his station. This inevitably brought additional scrutiny. Which has now landed him in court. And in court, unlike with the media, you only get to speak when spoken to.

The fountain of bullshit gets turned off. And truth gets to finally play its hand.

And I have a feeling truth, in this case, is going to come up aces …