gracchusdixit

Donald John Trump’s official announcement that he intended to run for the Republican Presidential nomination—after years of faux flirtation with the idea— provoked immediate and incredulous guffaws from the chattering classes.  How, they opined, could anyone possibly take Trump seriously?  All that hair, all that shameless self-promotion, all that braggadocio and bluster—surely such extravagant nonsense and bad taste would rule him out as a credible candidate.

But then the poll results began to roll in, and lo and behold, “the Donald” had soared to the top of the laughably long list of Republican hopefuls, besting even the presumptive front-runner, His Royal Highness Jeb Bush.  This left the pundits and prognosticators gaping in slack-jawed wonder, as they tried to rationalize a phenomenon they clearly could not fathom.

Some attributed Trump’s rise to simple name recognition, the result of years spent as the host of two low-rent television reality shows.  Others searched for an answer in the admiring envy many ordinary people feel for Trump’s purported financial success and business acumen.  Still others speculated, more charitably, that Trump is genuinely voicing the concerns of a certain segment of the Republican electorate, which does not trust other candidates to speak for them.

All these factors may well play their parts, but they do not explain the fundamental reason for Trump’s ascendancy.  That reason is much simpler.

The reason for Trump’s rise is that he is a consummate liar.  Indeed, “the Donald” has turned lying into an art form.

Trump never deigns to provide evidence to back up his outrageous claims.  He never condescends to cite facts.  He merely asserts what he would have others believe, ignoring, or steamrolling, anyone who presumes to correct him.

The lies begin with Trump himself.  He claims to be worth more than nine billion dollars, offering no proof except a piece of paper.  The last public audit of his financial condition occurred nearly twenty years ago, when he was several hundred million dollars in the red.  Since then, he has kept everyone guessing, and the disclosure he recently filed with the Federal Elections Commission did little to end the guesswork.  The only certainty is that, whatever Trump is actually worth, it isn’t nine billion dollars or anything even remotely close.

Then, there are the more consequential lies.  Trump continues to insist, for example, that he doesn’t know where Barack Obama was born, despite the fact that the President’s birth records were made public long ago.  He claims that Hillary Clinton was the “worst Secretary of State in history,” despite the fact that such a thing is unknowable.  He asserts that our border with Mexico is a “sieve,” despite the reality that we have more border agents than ever before and levels of illegal immigration have plummeted.  He proclaims that immigrants are flooding the country with crime and “infectious disease,” despite a total absence of evidence to support such canards.  And finally, he declares that he has a sure-fire plan for ridding the world of the Islamic State, without so much as a hint of what that plan might be.

“The Donald” is by no means the first to have mastered the art of the big lie.  On the contrary, he is merely following in the footsteps of the spiritual father of all gargantuan liars:

…in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously…a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying.

The man who wrote those words was the most accomplished liar in history—Adolph Hitler.

The secret of Trump’s particular success, however, goes beyond the fact that his lies are “colossal.”   The secret is that his lies, like Hitler’s, are circular.  There is nothing new in the whoppers he tells; they merely reflect the falsehoods his audience already believes.  By pandering to existing prejudices, he confirms them, reinforcing his own credibility with the credulous.  In short, the more Trump lies, the more convincing he becomes to those who want to believe him.  That is why he now leads the Republican pack.  That is why, however unlikely it seems, he just might win.