Quinta Juresic has written an article in lawfareblog.com where she argues that Trump is a bullshitter, not a liar, and discusses the difference as well as the more dangerous nature bullshitting presents. She also discusses the challenge this poses to fulfilling the oath of office of the Presidency. She joined WNYC to discuss it.
During the 2016 campaign, fact-checkers were working overtime to show that Donald Trump makes false statements at a rate that far surpassed other candidates. Ever. And some have argued that this should not be considered garden variety "lying."
Trump routinely says things that are obviously untrue - stuff that can be proven wrong in seconds. He denies ever having said things that he said publicly, sometimes as recent as a month prior. And he promotes wild conspiracies with no evidence.
According to Juresic, Trump is not lying, he is spewing bullshit and the difference matters which Harry Frankfurt explained in his book “Bullshit” . Lying intentionally obscures the truth, while bullshit shows a lack of connection to a concern with truth and indifference to how things really are, which poses a greater danger than lying.
Trump just says whatever he feels like to make himself feel better at any given time, with no relation to the facts, rather than intentionally deceiving us. For instance the 3 million illegal votes tweet, or that protestors who were supposedly paid to protest his election. He’s making up the reality that he finds convenient at the time.
There are profound challenges a post-truth president presents to taking the oath of office. There is a fundamental inability to uphold the oath of office and to uphold the Constitution and the rule of law.
The oath states the president must swear to faithfully execute the oath and take care that laws be faithfully executed. The oath commits the president to a level of respect to the constitution and rule of law which is fundamentally opposed to the nature of someone who peddles bullshit.
This will be the “LOL nothing matters presidency” — trump’s words have no relation to the facts but it doesn’t matter. This was the statement passed around by political reporters after every nonsense spewed by Trump during the campaign.
A bullshitter has no respect for meaning and no understanding of consequence. If your words bring about a negative consequence you can simply say “i never said that” and absolve yourself of responsibility.
There is an Incompatibility between the office of the president and the man we have elected to fulfill it. This is not a legal argument, but rather an issue of his character. For example his phone call with Pakistan and the alarm it sent through India. He made commitments he didn’t realize he had made.
Obama said after the election: “There are certain elements of his [Trump’s] temperament that will not serve him well unless he recognizes and corrects them” Obama was talking about Trump’s bullshitting.
But Trump’s victory forces us to consider what it means for the president himself to be, as it were, full of bullshit. How will his incessant bullshitting affect his ability to carry out the duties of his office? What does it mean to have a bullshit artist as President of the United States—a leader both responsible for and constrained by the rule of law? And more specifically, what does it mean to have a bullshit artist swear the Oath of Office and promise to “faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States,” when the notion of hewing “faithfully” to any commitment is so fundamentally antithetical to the character of bullshit?
I have my doubts. I suspect that the bullshitter’s foundational disrespect for meaning and consequence—in other words, the fact that the rallying cry of the bullshitter is essentially “lol nothing matters”—will make it impossible for Donald Trump to faithfully execute the laws of this nation and the duties of the Oath of Office and to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution. It will make it impossible for him to take care in doing so. It will make it impossible for him to honor and tend to the system of law whose authority and significance he does not acknowledge or respect. To the extent he proves capable of these things, moreover, it will be because he ceases to be a bullshitter, a turn of events that is hard to imagine today.
Now that we are post election it is obvious Trump will not change. Bullshitter in Chief.