Masha Gessen
Appearances
This American Life
855: That’s a Weird Thing to Lie About
But he also lied about the weather. Because it was rainy and, you know, the cameras panned to all these former presidents. And Trump claimed that when he started to speak, the sun came out and the clouds parted, you know, as though God herself were on his side. And it was an easily checkable story. It was definitely not true.
This American Life
855: That’s a Weird Thing to Lie About
And then he emerges from this and says, you know, that that's something entirely different than we saw with our lying eyes.
This American Life
855: That’s a Weird Thing to Lie About
Okay. Lies can serve a number of functions. People lie to deflect, to avoid embarrassment or evade punishment by creating doubt, to escape confrontation or lighten the blow, to make themselves appear better, to get others to do or give something, and even to entertain. However unskilled a person may be at lying, they usually hope that the lie will be convincing.
This American Life
855: That’s a Weird Thing to Lie About
Executives want shareholders to think that they have devised a foolproof path to profits. Defendants want juries to believe that there is a chance that someone else committed the crime. People in relationships want their partners to think that they have never even considered cheating. Guests want the host to think that they like their fish overcooked.
This American Life
855: That’s a Weird Thing to Lie About
These lies can be annoying or amusing, but they're surmountable. They collapse in the face of facts. The Trumpian lie is different. It is the power lie or the bully lie. It is the lie of the bigger kid who took your hat and is wearing it while denying that he took it. There's no defense against this lie because the point of the lie is to assert power, to show I can say what I want when I want to.
This American Life
855: That’s a Weird Thing to Lie About
the power of light conjures a different reality that demands that you choose between your experience and the bully's demands. Are you going to insist that you're wet from the rain or give in and say that the sun is shining?
This American Life
855: That’s a Weird Thing to Lie About
Yeah, these are bully lies. And I'm seeing, you know, more and more of the sort of impossibility of standing up to it. Because there are now a lot of these people, right? It's not just Trump. The first administration was Trump and his lies and a bunch of psychophants. Now they're kind of all, particularly Trump and Musk, are just kind of running. One is constantly getting ahead of the other.
This American Life
855: That’s a Weird Thing to Lie About
Federal employees have fortunes in the tens of millions with a salary of $180,000.
This American Life
855: That’s a Weird Thing to Lie About
Oh, absolutely. I mean, I wrote a piece about it at the time saying that it was totally Trumpian behavior. I did not win any friends with that piece, but that's what it felt like because we could see it. We could see the debate. And then there were all these people around Biden who were saying, don't believe your lying eyes. He is in control. He's running the country.
This American Life
855: That’s a Weird Thing to Lie About
Well, at this point, there's every indication, and by every indication, I mean all the things that he constantly says, that he actually thinks that that's how government should work. It should be one person making decisions.
This American Life
855: That’s a Weird Thing to Lie About
Yeah. Or... Calling out the governor of Maine for, I guess in his opinion, not following his executive order on disallowing transgender athletes in sports. With the governor responding that the state of Maine has its own laws. And him basically saying, I can't remember the exact quote, but basically saying, I'm in charge here and we'll see who wins.
This American Life
855: That’s a Weird Thing to Lie About
A better future that's basically the past is a common trait to all modern autocrats. I mean, in the 20th century, we also had some futuristic autocrats. The Soviet totalitarianism was probably the most vivid example. But all the autocrats have come to power in the world like in the last 15 or so years on this wave of of resurgent autocracies, they're all past-oriented.
This American Life
855: That’s a Weird Thing to Lie About
They're saying, like, we had a glorious past and we've got to go back to it. Yeah, it's make whatever country great again. And it's always an imaginary past. When you felt comfortable, when you didn't have these anxieties, when your children were just like you, when men were men and women were women, and everyone spoke the same language as you do.
This American Life
855: That’s a Weird Thing to Lie About
I think a few things are happening there, and I think they're pretty scary. I think the first time he mentioned Greenland, which was during his first term, it was probably at a moment's inspiration. He probably meant nothing by it.
This American Life
855: That’s a Weird Thing to Lie About
Exactly, which is very much… What he does all the time. Yeah. One thing about Trump, though, is that he's very sensitive to being heard. Greenland was heard. And because Greenland was heard, it became a kind of a day fix. And so now in his second term, he's bringing up Greenland again. I think it's a whole other story. It's no longer an absurd trolling kind of meme thing.
This American Life
855: That’s a Weird Thing to Lie About
It's beginning to approach policy. And I think that the way that he is also throwing around the Panama Canal and the Gulf of America, of course he's doing this because... totalitarian leaders have to promise expansion that's like why um it's it's like it's an axiom uh what are you saying no what do you like they have a rule book that they have to follow absolutely um I'm actually half serious.
This American Life
855: That’s a Weird Thing to Lie About
Yeah, we're going to take over other lands. And what it is, I think, is it's a promise of greatness. It's a trade-off. Generally speaking, autocratic regimes don't, in the long run, prove economically beneficial.
This American Life
855: That’s a Weird Thing to Lie About
To the population. Right. Right. They're usually economically beneficial to the actual autocrat and his cohort. And you will not necessarily be personally better off. So what is he going to actually give them? What he's going to give them is a sense of belonging to something greater.
This American Life
855: That’s a Weird Thing to Lie About
Yeah. Yeah. The greatest country in the world that is expanding its borders.
This American Life
855: That’s a Weird Thing to Lie About
Well, the problem is that we're always looking for that one thing or those three things. And now once we check them off, we're living in an autocracy. The problem is it's actually always a gradual process. And it's happening much faster here than it's happened in any country that I'm familiar with. Really? Yes.
This American Life
855: That’s a Weird Thing to Lie About
I mean, it took Putin quite a long time to establish actual authoritarian rule and then another number of years to turn that regime into a totalitarian one. The way that Trump is taking a sledgehammer to government... is certainly unprecedented in my memory.
This American Life
855: That’s a Weird Thing to Lie About
But I think that things that we have to look for, some of them you can sort of measure like when they start consistently ignoring court decisions that are not favorable to them. So far they've ignored some, it seems like, but it doesn't look like it's consistent.
This American Life
855: That’s a Weird Thing to Lie About
But at some point I would expect them, or let's say I will fear that they will say these court decisions that go against the government are illegitimate. So that will be a huge marker. But then there are softer things like shifting consensus. And I think it's already happening.
This American Life
855: That’s a Weird Thing to Lie About
Like that's one way of understanding what people have also been calling the obeying in advance that we have seen sort of all over the place. The most vivid example of it is by far not the only one, right? But it's Mark Zuckerberg's little address when he announced that they were not going to have fact checking on Facebook anymore. He kept saying, you know, things have changed.
This American Life
855: That’s a Weird Thing to Lie About
This is a new moment. We're going to move our operations to Texas because that's the new moment we're living in. All of these things are sort of ways of saying, look, I'm fully accepting that Trump has created a new reality. And I'm going to take all my things and move into that reality with him and live there with him. And anybody who refuses to do that, they're going to be left out in the cold.