Trump’s persona is not even “truthful hyperbole”
Ahead of the 2016 election Donald Trump won, The New York Times cited a now-famous paragraph from Donald Trump’s ghost-written “The Art of the Deal.” David Barstow wrote:
“I call it truthful hyperbole. It’s an innocent form of exaggeration — and a very effective form of promotion.”
For example, in the now-infamous Trump University litigation, Mr. Trump was asked in a deposition about a script that had been prepared for Trump University instructors. According to the script, the instructors were supposed to tell their students the following: “I remember one time Mr. Trump said to us over dinner, he said, ‘Real estate is the only market that, when there’s a sale going on, people run from the store.’ You don’t want to run from the store.”
No such dinners ever took place, Mr. Trump acknowledged. In fact, Mr. Trump struggled to identify a single one of the instructors he claimed to have handpicked, even after he was shown their photographs. Nonetheless, Mr. Trump was not bothered by the script’s false insinuation of real estate secrets shared over chummy dinners. Asked if this example constituted “innocent exaggeration,” Mr. Trump replied, “Yes, I’d say that’s an innocent exaggeration.”
Trump’s entire life is hyperbole, like the book he did not write, the buildings he did not own, and the fortune he did not make. Theologians will tell you the Devil can tell the truth when it suits his purposes. It’s just not his preferred mode of communication. Nor is it Trump’s. Whatever he’s selling, Trump is always selling himself, and it’s always false advertising.
Heather Cox Richardson comments on the Time article posted Tuesday about Trump’s plans for a second presidency. To head off critics, Time included transcripts of interviews behind the profile, and fact checks on Trump’s claims. They demonstrate, Richardson writes, that his “narrative is based largely on fantasy.” The material reveals more about the right’s stance on the truth:
Trump’s own words prove the truth of what careful observers have been saying about his plans based on their examination of MAGA Republicans’ speeches, interviews, Project 2025, and so on, often to find themselves accused of a liberal bias that makes them exaggerate the dangers of a second Trump presidency.
The idea that truthful reporting based on verifiable evidence is a plot by “liberal media” to undermine conservative values had its start in 1951, when William F. Buckley Jr., fresh out of Yale, published God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of “Academic Freedom.” Fervently opposed to the bipartisan liberal consensus that the federal government should regulate business, provide a basic social safety net, protect civil rights, and promote infrastructure, Buckley was incensed that voters continued to support such a system. He rejected the “superstition” that fact-based public debate would enable people to choose the best option from a wide range of ideas—a tradition based in the Enlightenment—because such debate had encouraged voters to choose the liberal consensus, which he considered socialism.
Buckley was not opposed to superstition, nor to self-creation. His bias was for his own, puffed up with a “preposterously mellifluous,” “patrician accent” filled with nouns, verbs and adjectives from the Oxford English Dictionary and a fondness for Latin.
Trump’s trial in Manhattan for falsifying business records and violating campaign finance laws is poking holes in the false image Trump has spent his life constructing with pufferey. Buckley’s heirs are frantically applying tape to those holes to keep the Trump balloon from deflating before everyone’s eyes.
Greg Sargent writes at The New Republic:
Because Donald Trump must always be seen as wielding absolute mastery over his hapless, flailing opponents, he and his propagandists want you to believe his hush-money trial in Manhattan has proven nothing but a smashing political success for him.
On Monday night, Trump posted a video on social media featuring Fox personality Jesse Watters gushing that his trial may win him the White House. Trump also promoted a video of Fox’s Jeanine Pirro insisting that it showcases his ability to “withstand pressure.” Other Fox figures have spun Trump’s buffoonish outbreaks of narcolepsy in court as proof he’s Owning the Libs: Certain of acquittal, he can do some power-napping while showing the trial the contempt it deserves.
In private, Trump appears less confident. “Indeed, this saga shows how deeply flimsy the vast illusion that MAGA propagandists have woven around Trump and his legal travails has truly become.”
Aided by his cultish fans, Trump must prop up the fiction that he is and always will be, in Seinfeld terms, master of his domain. What’s more buffoonish than Fox’s contortions are the lengths to which MAGAworld and Trump himself will go to reimagine the morbidly obese former president as impossibly ripped and powerful even as he nods off in court.
Sargent concludes:
Voters outside the MAGA information universe regard the charges against him as serious, and they see the other prosecutions against him in a similarly grave light. A whole lot of people will likely see Trump’s sneering dismissal of these proceedings—the dozing off, the attacks on jurors, the rage-fits against the supposed unfairness of it all—as whiny entitlement, as contempt for the very notion that he should ever be held accountable for anything.
That very survival of the republic could rest on bursting that Trump bubble.
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