President Trump

This week I was watching the German news, which led with a surprising story: there had been a promising new breakthrough in solving the USA-EU tariff standoff. According to the reporter (Tagesthemen), President Trump had made a firm commitment to a deal with the EU. Interestingly, there had been no such report in US mainstream media. The item in the German news came from a statement the President had made in meeting with the Prime Minister of Italy, Giorgia Meloni, who was in Washington this week: “There will be a trade deal, 100%”. German media had taken the remark as a statement of fact. US media had taken it with a large dose of salt, as typical of promises made that never actually materialize (even Fox News). In fact, exaggerations, meaningless promises, and outright lies have characterized Trump for his entire professional life. The New York Times kept an amazing count of the lies early in his first administration. The fact-checkers at The Washington Post cataloged 30,573 false or misleading statements over the course of his four-year presidency; hat comes to an average of 21 every day he was in office.

This kind of behavior is inconceivable from a German perspective. German politicians are held accountable for the slightest act of dishonesty or statement of untruth. A series of ministers in the federal government in Berlin over the last few years have had to resign after being found to have plagiarized passages in academic work. Small potatoes compared to Trump’s dishonesty but considered unacceptable from a German perspective. This phenomenon, it seems to me, can be linked to well-known difficulty many Germans have with engaging in small talk, i.e., talking just to talk, shooting the breeze, without any serious information to convey. German conversations more often than in the US are transactional – trying to get things done, not just an occasion for socializing (although German do plenty of that as well, normally outside of work hours).

Americans are used to bullshitting, meaning to talk without regard to whether assertions made are true to not – just to keep a conversation going or to show off. A piece in Psychology Today points out that bullshitting has been a topic of serious academic inquiry going back to an essay by Harry Frankfurter in 1986, “On Bullshit” but that it seems to have exploded in recent times:

Bullshitting tends to happen when there’s social pressure to provide an opinion and a social “pass” that will allow someone to get away with it. Three decades ago, Dr. Frankfurt noted that such conditions were present in an America where people felt entitled if not obligated to offer “opinions about everything,” and politics in particular, and where objective reality was often denied in favor of voicing impassioned personal opinions. Fast-forwarding to the “post-truth” world of 2020, where facts and expertise have been declared dead, opinions are routinely confused with news, and objective evidence is endlessly refuted, the case could be made that bullshit has reached epic proportions.

From that perspective, President Trump is the Bullshitter-in-Chief, always ready to provide an opinion with no justification, tell a lie to cover over a misstep, or make up willy-nilly statistics or “facts”. Unfathomable for Germans, and should be as well for everyone else.