On Lying in State (1)
ANNOUNCER: Welcome to Moyers on Democracy. Want to know why presidents lie – and which one is the worst? You've come to the right place. The prolific Eric Alterman is with us: historian, scholar, journalist and media critic, he has just published his 11th book: LYING IN STATE. That's L-Y-I-N-G. And with it Alterman has won new praise for his colorful and engaging prose, his deep research, and his insights into our troubled present. A distinguished professor of English and Journalism for the City University of New York, media columnist for THE NATION magazine, and author of a biography of Bruce Springsteen, Eric Alterman's life's work has been to keep an unflinching eye on America's flaws while marveling at its promise. Here to talk with him is Bill Moyers.
BILL MOYERS: Hello, Eric.
ERIC ALTERMAN: Hi, Bill.
BILL MOYERS: Good to see you.
BILL MOYERS: Anyone who reads your book, LYING IN STATE would know that you have never doubted that truth and politics are on rather bad terms with each other.
ERIC ALTERMAN: Yeah. It's my second book on the topic. And this time I was shocked by how little regard everyone else seems to have for truth in a presidency. So that recent surveys of historians and of the public itself rated presidents very high who were known liars, and other presidents who told the truth as very low. I read a biography of every single president that we've had to write this book. And very rarely did any of the historians focus on this issue. Because they just didn't think lying was important. They thought it was just part of the job. Certainly, almost all politicians do some lying. The lying is part of a larger purpose that serves the policy preferences and goals and ideals of the presidency. But Trump lies because he has no regard for truth whatsoever. A lie is just as good as truth. In fact, he really can't distinguish between the two. There was a case yesterday where Daniel Dale, who is a national hero for the reporting he's been doing on lying. So much better than what you get in THE WASHINGTON POST, because it's contextual.
BILL MOYERS: He's a fact-checker for CNN.
ERIC ALTERMAN: Right. He pointed out yesterday, Trump bragged repeatedly about getting an award from the Bay of Pigs Brigade, which he didn't get. Now, that's not unusual. But they did endorse him, and there was a ceremony. There was no reason for Trump to lie. He could have said the same thing. He had a picture of them giving him a plaque when they endorsed him. And he could have gotten the story right, and it would have been just about as impressive. But he didn't care to get it right. It's not in the slightest– he has no interest in getting it right. It's also true with regard to the coronavirus, and with regard to the hurricane in Puerto Rico, and with regard to immigration policy. In regard to terrorism policy. And it's a disease because this fish is rotting from the head. It's infected the entire government. You know, the education policy, environmental policy, economic policy, it's all a catastrophe, and it's all being lied about. So, all of these lies and our acceptance of these lies are laying the groundwork for something close to an American form of fascism if it comes to that.
BILL MOYERS: I wish every American, could read LYING IN STATE. It has the potential to shock, to inform, and to teach us how democratic politics really work. But it's a hard sell, isn't it, lying from the top? Writing about it. Reporting on it. Analyzing it. Too many people seem just not to care.
ERIC ALTERMAN: Well, there are a lot of problems with it. One is that even though most of us do some lying, none of us want to be called liars. And calling people in power a liar is considered very controversial, even if you report the fact that they're lying. So, one big difference between my book and the NEW YORK TIMES and THE WASHINGTON POST and THE WALL STREET JOURNAL is that they won't call anybody a liar unless they know the person's intent, which is almost impossible to know, because you have to be a mind reader.
ERIC ALTERMAN: The thing is you can't believe anything Trump says. Trump, at a meeting with Justin Trudeau, the prime minister of Canada?
BILL MOYERS: Right.
ERIC ALTERMAN: And he lied to him during the meeting about our trade deficit, or surplus with Canada. And then he came out of the meeting and he spoke to the press and he bragged about how he had lied to the guy. Now, what is the purpose of lying to another world leader if you're going to announce to the world that you lied to the world leader?
BILL MOYERS: So, for Trump, the lying goes beyond the cost of doing business. It's inherent in his nature?
ERIC ALTERMAN: In the beginning, when I started writing this book, I figured, well, he grew up in the world of New York City real estate, and in that world, it's like buyer beware. You know, there's no penalty for people not trusting your word. You're expected to check out everything, and if you don't, you're the shmuck. But there's something really sick about this guy that he just has no conception of truth. It is completely meaningless to him. Somewhere along the line – and I suppose Mary Trump's book gives some insight into this – he just lost all conception of truth and just his words became 100% instrumental in getting what he wants. But the things that he wants are just things that he wants that minute. He might want something completely the opposite in another minute.
BILL MOYERS: You write in here that Americans tend to tolerate presidential lies as long as they get the job done.
ERIC ALTERMAN: In the beginning of the book I outline four different kinds of lies. There's misinformation where they're just giving you bad information because they haven't bothered to get the truth. There's disinformation where they're purposely lying because they have a different goal. Can I say bullshit here?
BILL MOYERS: Sure.
ERIC ALTERMAN: Because I'm using it in the philosophical term, what Harry Frankfurt, the Princeton professor, wrote a book about it called ON BULLSHIT, where he describes– you just don't care if something's true or not. So, you just say whatever you want. And Trump does all three of those things. And then there's a fourth one, and it's the most interesting and difficult to get a handle on. It's called bald-faced lying. And philosophers say that bald-faced lying is not always lying, because when you tell a bald-faced lie, the person you're lying to knows your lying. And so they're not deceived. You've got to assume that a bunch of them know that he's lying. There's no getting around it. It's reported on. I mean a lot of them live in this bubble with only Fox News and Breitbart and whatever else they're getting and they approve of it. They like his lies. They've either been convinced their whole lives that all politicians lie, and Trump's no different, or they like the fact that he's lying about people they don't like, like Jews and liberals and immigrants and dark-skinned people and LGBTQ people. And people who they think are taking their country away from them. So, they don't mind that he's lying. They think it's warfare.
BILL MOYERS: Is Trump the worst of the presidents you've studied?
ERIC ALTERMAN: There is no contest. Trump is something new. He's a different animal.
BILL MOYERS: What's the difference between Trump and other presidents?
ERIC ALTERMAN: Well, other presidents have always lied with a purpose to their particular lie. Trump just lies about everything. Everything is a lie. You can't believe anything he says. So there's no ballast. There's no foundation.
BILL MOYERS: Here's one thing that's different, it seems to me, from the past, is that not one Republican office holder has rebuked the president over calling America's soldiers “suckers and losers,” or admitting that he kept the truth about the virus from the public. Not one that I can find. Not even, not even Romney.
ERIC ALTERMAN: You know, Donald Trump, it's no secret– his personality cult has taken over the Republican Party. Ever since around 2010 the Republican Party ceased to be, like, a normal party. It got unmoored from policy and from truth over time. It became such that if you told the truth about key things, like, say climate change, you couldn't have a career as a Republican politician. Its activists became married to a position that was divorced from truth, and this was supported by Fox News and Breitbart, et cetera. I would say this began initially with Ronald Reagan. It got much more intense with Newt Gingrich as speaker of the House. So that when Donald Trump said that Barack Obama was an illegitimate president because he had been born in Kenya, this was not a big leap from what Republicans had been saying for a long time. And in fact, if when the leaders of the Republican Party would go on the Sunday shows and they would be asked, do you think that Obama was born in this country? They wouldn't answer the question. They didn't want to take a position. Now, this got so bad that not only did a majority of Republicans believe that Obama was not born in this country, but a very significant percentage, approximately 40%, of Trump voters, I'm not kidding when I say this, believed that Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party were running a pedophile ring out of a pizza parlor in Washington. And that's because Trump and the Republican Party had been completely unmoored from truth. You know, American politics have always been a little unmoored from reality going back to the Indian Wars and slavery and white supremacy and expansion. There's always been problems with it, and that's, you know, what most of the book is about. The one thing that shocked me when I wrote this book was how important and how deeply entrenched the idea of white supremacy was. And how many policies were driven by the need to support the unspoken insistence and belief in white supremacy right up through the 1970s. And I say in the book that white supremacy and the need for expansion, which becomes an empire, which later becomes national security, are the two biggest reasons that presidents lied through the first 80% of our history. I would say that almost all presidents were trapped by this, by these two demands. That they uphold white supremacy, and yet pretend that they believe that all men are created equal. And presidents with the best of intentions could not avoid this trap, and it led almost all of them to lying.
BILL MOYERS: There's a record at THE WASHINGTON POST of more than 20,000 lies that Trump has told since he became president. Is there some point at which that many lies, 10,000, let's say becomes such a mass in the body politic, a big cancer in the body politic, that nobody knows how to get rid of?
ERIC ALTERMAN: First of all, just so that we're 100% accurate, THE WASHINGTON POST doesn't call them lies. They call them false statements because they don't take a position on lies. THE WASHINGTON POST has maybe once said that Trump was lying. NEW YORK TIMES also. Maybe once in the news columns. The op-ed pages they say it, but not in the news column. And I'm glad that THE WASHINGTON POST is doing my research for me, but their method is not helpful, because it's decontextualized. They say, Trump said this, here's the truth. Trump said this, here's the truth.
