As we head into 2024 with Donald Trump as the all but confirmed Republican nominee, any hope that Trump and his rampant lying—seemingly about anything and everything—might retreat into history has clearly become wishful thinking. Mendacity is back in town. The political ground, hardly stable over the past three years, has started to wobble once more. Facts, hardly in surplus in today’s political culture, are busily transforming themselves into opinions before our eyes. Many of us—including those in Trump’s own party—feel exhausted by our own indignation.
Back in 2020, when Trump launched his most audacious lie yet about his “stolen election” many commentators cited Hannah Arendt, evoking her idea of the audacious big lie to warn of how close America was getting to political meltdown. This khbrknews round, perhaps, rather than reaching to Arendt for a pithy soundbite or indignant tweet, we might want to read her more attentively. Arendt—the twentieth-century’s most dogged debunker of totalitarian fictions—gave clear warning that outrage alone would not be enough to stop lying in politics.
She had been interested in how the most outrageous lies get a political hold ever since Nazi lies about the Jews, Communists, and intellectuals drove her from Berlin in 1933 after her arrest by the Gestapo. She wrote her final analysis of the nature of the modern political lying after the publication of the Pentagon Papers revealed the extent to which American lawmakers and bureaucrats had carefully, patiently, painstakingly constructed a fiction about the Vietnam War—a fiction fit enough for other people’s children to die in.
Lying in politics is not new, Arendt counseled. The habits of totalitarian thinking persist long after totalitarian regimes have fallen. And she had a message for us today. “When we talk about lying,” she wrote, “let us remember that the lie did not creep into politics by some accident of human sinfulness; moral outrage, for this…
