Transcript
Speaker: I'm Jane Williams. This is the Red Eye Podcast. You can hear our live broadcast on Saturday mornings from 10 till noon at 100.5 FM in the Lower Mainland.
Speaker: Coming up in this episode, Tim Kenyon on what's behind Trump's endless stream of bullshit and how it fits into a pattern of authoritarian political speech.
Speaker: Most liars care enough about the truth to try to conceal it. But simply not caring either way is a different vice, one that American philosopher Harry Frankfurt defined as bullshitting.
Speaker: An example would be President Trump claiming that the U.S. has a trade deficit with Canada without having any idea whether that's true or false. Tim Kenyon examines the motivations behind Trump's relentless bullshitting in an article published in February.
Speaker: And we're very happy to have him on the show today to share his thoughts. Tim Kenyon is a professor and researcher on the philosophy of language, social epistemology, and critical thinking pedagogy in the Humanities Department at Brock University. And he joins me today from Niagara. Hello, Tim.
Speaker: Hi, Jane. Now, I looked up the word bullshit in several dictionaries, and there were some differences in the meanings that they gave. What's your working definition of bullshit?
Speaker: Well, of course, nobody owns the word, and it, as we all know, has a certain ordinary, quite earthy meaning. But in this slightly technical sense that we're talking about, it means speech that is indifferent to the truth.
Speaker: And in that sense, it's to be contrasted with both truth-telling and lying, or more precisely, deception. So as you pointed out in your introduction, even the liar cares enough, even the deceiver cares enough about the power of the truth to want to hide it.
Speaker: But the bullshitter just doesn't care either way. So an illustrative example might be, say, a salesperson who's just saying what they think the customer wants to hear.
Speaker: Now, if they think the customer wants to hear the truth about the product, they'll tell the truth. If they think the customer wants to hear something false, they'll say something false. But it's not because they're trying to, you know, conceal the truth or trying to promote the truth. They're just trying to make the sale and they don't care either way. So that would be a really clear example of bullshitting.
Speaker: You refer to Harry Frankfurt in your article and a book that he wrote in 2005 called On Bullshit, which says that bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies.
Speaker: How so? I think what motivated Frankfurt to think that is the fact that the bullshitter is indifferent to the power of the truth, right? That there is, even though the liar is attempting to conceal the truth, even that act alone reflects a certain kind of appreciation for the significance of the truth, the power of it.
Speaker: Whereas the bullshitter just doesn't care. And so it reflects a certain devaluing or nihilism about the truth that in Frankfurt's view, and I think I agree with this, is even more corrosive.
Speaker: You and your colleague, Jennifer Sahl, wrote a chapter in a book on lying and perjury in a 2022 book, and your chapter was called Bald-Faced Bullshit and Authoritarian Political Speech.
Speaker: And you talk about how both Donald Trump and former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson can make statements that everyone knows are lies, and yet voters still trust them.
Speaker: How do you make sense of what they're doing? Well, that's a great question. And it was, in fact, the question that really animated Jenny and i in our work.
Speaker: There are a few answers. One answer is that the trust that people have in a public figure isn't always or isn't just trust that they are always speaking the truth.
Speaker: There's a different kind of trust that comes down to whether you trust that somebody is on your team or reflects your values. And so in a highly polarized political environment, the kind of trust that a politician's base will have in them might be the trust that even though they say things that are lies, even though they say things that are clearly bullshit,
Speaker: they're not lying to their base and they're not bullshitting their base. Their core demographic recognizes that the lies and the bullshit are targeted at a different audience. And that audience is their common enemy or their common opponent.
Speaker: And so our conclusion was that when you have authoritarian politicians in these highly polarized environments, That's where you get these situations where really ostentatious bullshit and outrageously obvious lies can still be winning political strategies.
Speaker: Let's look at an example of that. Trump said that Zelensky was a dictator and Ukraine started the war. How does that illustrate what you were saying just then? what are the various parts of that?
Speaker: This comes down to the kind of thing we've seen from Trump for a long time now, right? This didn't start with Zelensky, but it's a great recent example. These kinds of lies, sometimes they're what Professor Saul and I called compliance lies, and sometimes they're just intended to be displays of dominance.
Speaker: Russell Muirhead and Nancy Rosenblum in a recent book on conspiracist thinking called A Lot of People Are Saying, pointed out that it's not even clear that Trump cares whether his lies are believed in some of these cases, as opposed to whether they're validated.
Speaker: And so one way of testing the loyalty of your subordinates and binding your subordinates to you more closely is to compel them to acquiesce.
Speaker: in really outrageous lies, right? It's easy to get people to say the truth, right? If we're standing outside and it's pouring down rain, and I say it's raining, it's no kind of accomplishment if you also say that it's raining.
Speaker: But if we're standing under a clear blue sky, and I say it's pouring rain, and I can get you to say, oh, yes, it is pouring rain. In that sense, I've really made a kind of a flex over you.
Speaker: And in a way, you've showed your loyalty to me, etc. So outrageous lies like this, you know, that Ukraine started the war, honestly, play a couple of different roles. And one of them is that kind of compliance lie, forcing others to repeat your lies as a show of loyalty.
Speaker: But also they are what we call a power move in the sense that it's illustrating to Zelensky himself and to Trump's other ideological opponents that he could just say whatever he wants.
Speaker: that he will not be held to the usual norms of conversational responsibility, and that nobody can make him do that. So it's a way of establishing his power over the media, over his interlocutors, and over Zelensky himself.
Speaker: And so it would totally land different ways with different audiences. So so that might be targeted at ah Democrats or at Europe or liberals, whoever, but with another audience being Russia.
Speaker: It's so important. It's really the heart of the point that I'm trying to make in the conversation piece. And it's it's the heart of the point that Jenny, Saul and I made in our article that because there are multiple audiences to these kinds of utterances, they can look really baffling. The utterances can look really baffling. Why would somebody say these things?
Speaker: But it makes a lot more sense when you recognize that there are a couple of games being played in parallel. And that speech that is ostensibly directed just at one audience is very often a performance for another audience.
Speaker: And that audience gets to be in on the joke. They get to be part of the performance themselves by responding to it, right? So if you think that Trump's outrageous lies are great because they trigger the libs, right?
Speaker: You get to be part of the act. You don't just sit and watch that happen. You can be part of the act by cheering for it, right? By waiting until he says that three equals two,
Speaker: and then clapping and saying that that's the greatest mathematical discovery in history, now you are also being part of triggering the libs. So there is that kind of, there's like a side kind of communication that's going on between Trump and his base when he says things like that fentanyl is flooding into the United States from Canada.
Speaker: Everybody knows that's false. Maybe even his base, at least elements of his base, know that that's false. ah But they also know that when he says it He's showing Canada or he's showing other people in the United States that he can't be made to back down.
Speaker: A classic piece of Trump bullshit that really got legs is the one about Canada becoming the 51st state. How did that start out initially?
Speaker: Yes, that started out, as far as I can tell, as just a kind of random outburst in a meeting in November between Prime Minister Trudeau and Trump.
Speaker: And at first, there was very little interest in it. The initial AP story on the meeting didn't even mention that line. It only started to get legs after Fox News ran with the story, and that seemed to compel Trudeau to do a press release saying, this was just a joke, he wasn't serious about it.
Speaker: But as soon as it became clear that Trudeau himself and that other people in his government and that Canadians more generally and that American liberals were angry about this or annoyed by it or frightened by it, that created the conditions for Trump to double down.
Speaker: And then he's been doubling down on that ever since. It's a great illustration of the problem with assuming that Trump means what he says.
Speaker: And that if he doesn't mean what he says, then it isn't serious. So there's on the one hand, you think, well, if he means what he says, then either... He's got no idea, he's just grossly misinformed or he's completely ignorant or what haven't you because he says these outrageous things.
Speaker: Or he is deliberately insincere and this is some sort of five dimensional chess negotiating strategy. But if he doesn't mean what he says, then it's just bullshit and why should we be taking it seriously?
Speaker: That I think is a really tempting but problematic way of thinking about Trump. He very often doesn't mean what he says at the moment that words come out of his mouth.
Speaker: But that doesn't mean it isn't deadly serious, because his response to the reception that his various kind of outrageous outbursts get become extremely serious indeed.
Speaker: And it doesn't matter if it started off as trolling. It doesn't matter if it started off as a joke. What matters is what you did, right? If you punch someone as a joke, you punched them.
Speaker: If you invade Poland, ironically, you've invaded Poland. So the fact that a lot of these things are just kind of random outbursts for Trump doesn't mean that they aren't extremely serious, that they don't become extremely serious, as he recognizes that some of these things are ways of exciting his base and dismaying his enemies.
Speaker: So I guess the $64,000 question is, how should we respond? Right. And that is a lot more complicated question now than it would have been this time last year, because now he's president.
Speaker: And so you can say somebody is fundamentally unserious, but a fundamentally unserious person who holds the levers of power in the United States has to be taken seriously. I think one thing we can do, at least, is understand where this is coming from, both for our own mental health, the right, to understand what we're hearing, but also, I think, as a media industry, it would be good to see more analysis of his outbursts and the things that he's pushing forward, to see those things explicitly as performances for his base, and to let go of this tempting urge to analyze what
Speaker: the things that he says in terms of, you know, to analyze his talk about tariffs as if it reflects, for instance, some deep economic strategy or view, as opposed to just being something he said, something he's done before, something he threatened.
Speaker: He threatened this a few weeks ago, and then they didn't come through. And a lot of his opposition, late night talk show hosts, et etc. in the United States, characterized that as a climb down for him.
Speaker: And so all the talk had to come back again. And we are once again, you know, waiting to see if there are going to be tariffs. Why? Is it because there's something economically deep about tariffs in Trump's thinking?
Speaker: Well, I think it's a fixed idea for him, but it's, I think, at least as much about displaying for his base that he didn't back down and that he can't be made to back down.
Speaker: So I think just a much clearer public understanding of what he does as performance, rather than as reflecting a kind of stable strategy. So don't try and comb through what he said to find out if he's going to do X or Y. think you call that sane washing it, which is ah a wonderful term. Yes, that's not my term, ah but it is a very important one. and And it's something that I think explains a lot of Trump's success in the recent election cycle, because so many of the major
Speaker: media outlets in the United States responded to the things that he said, you know, you just the most outrageous or even incoherent speeches that you can listen to and not hear a single intelligible sentence, but then would be reported in ways that had sort of cobbled together some extremely charitable interpretation.
Speaker: And so this was characterized as sane washing. And I think moving away from sane washing would be a matter of being pretty explicit about saying, it looks like Trump is saying this because he's performing for this group, or he's performing for this group, and in a way, kind of breaking the fourth wall on his performances.
Speaker: Well, I found your article tremendously ah helpful, and I really appreciate it. Thanks so much for talking with me today, Tim. Thank you so much for having me. I've been speaking with Tim Kenyon. You can find his recent article at theconversation.com.
Speaker: It was published on February twenty five You've been listening to the Red Eye Podcast, produced by an independent media collective based in Vancouver.
Speaker: If you enjoyed this episode, it would be great if you left a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps other people to find us. Also, please consider sharing this episode with a friend or telling someone about our podcast.
Speaker: To keep up with the show, you can subscribe to Red Eye wherever you listen to your podcasts. And you can follow us on Blue Sky at Red Eye Radio. I'm Jane Williams.
Speaker: Thanks for listening.
