Lies can serve a number of functions. People lie to deflect, to avoid embarrassment or evade punishment by creating doubt … [and they] hope that the lie will be convincing. … These lies can be annoying or amusing, but they are surmountable. They collapse in the face of facts. … The Trumpian lie is different. It is the power lie, or the bully lie.
—Masha Gessen, Surviving Autocracy (2020)
I love Masha Gessen’s idea that Trump’s is “the lie of the bigger kid who took your hat and is wearing it—while denying that he took it. There is no defense against this lie because the point of the lie is to assert power.” Gessen’s taxonomy of lies is a useful guide to the way an aspirational Mussolini strives to replace reality with increasingly outlandish claims that subjects are forced to accept despite their evident falsity. Getting citizens to show their abjection by accepting as false what’s manifestly true is the point of the exercise. The invocation of the Alien Enemies Act, the deportations in direct defiance of judicial orders, and the concomitant lies about those deportations, are examples from March 2025; by the time you read this, another conglomeration of such lies will have taken its turn monopolizing the news.
Whether “power lie” is the best catch-all for appraising the early days of the Trump administration, however, or even the administration’s most dangerous form of deception, matters a great deal. Nothing is more valuable than a clear-headed understanding of which particular lies are most likely to succeed in the present environment, and which are just evanescent byproducts of the generally mendacious atmosphere. Dodge the decoys, save the right kind of energy to counter the real blows. Turning up the heat in lamenting the current crisis risks mistaking a mere mirage for a more substantial threat.
In looking for parallels between the Nazism and Soviet communism of mid-20th-century Europe and 2020s America, many recent writers, including Gessen, have sought inspiration in Hannah Arendt’s magisterial Origins of Totalitarianism (1951). In the spirit of Public Book’s “B-Sides” series (shining a light on works mistakenly kicked to the curb of history), I’d love to make the case for a different Arendt work: “Lying in Politics: Reflections on the Pentagon Papers” (1971). Arendt’s account of what went wrong with US foreign policy in the Vietnam era is germane today for what it reveals about the ultimately brittle nature of autocratic power structures. By her telling, those who want to lead a democratic country over the brink into authoritarian tactics begin by intending to deceive others, succumb to self-deception, and fall eventually into the atmosphere of “defactualization.” Trump’s “power lie” is only a single item in the Trumpian food pyramid of lies, bluster, bullshit, and bluff. If we are ready to start disassembling it, Gessen is not enough: Arendt is the guide we need.
Defactualization
“Lying in Politics” is dense with American detail, and it captures aspects of Trump’s present machinations that we ignore at our peril. The piece is framed as a review of the collected Pentagon Papers, which document the messy inner workings of US policy in Vietnam from 1945 to 1968. Arendt links the deceptive practices initiated under Johnson and Kennedy to what follows under Nixon. The downward trajectory for democratic practice is clear: She sees a damaging sequence whereby those in government practiced “deception, self-deception, image making, ideologizing, and defactualization.” Inch by inch, she sees America moving forward toward that all-pervasive condition of truthlessness that in 1978 Vaclav Havel described as “living a lie.”
Arendt’s essay starts with lying’s omnipresence. Because humans have always been able “to deny in thought and word whatever happens to be the actual fact … the whole texture of facts … is always in danger of being perforated by single lies or torn to shreds by the organized lying of groups, nations, or classes, or denied and distorted, often carefully covered up by reams of falsehoods.” It is pointless—and a marker of the Hegelian idealism she frequently criticizes—to hope for some purely theoretical account of the world that settles what’s the case in advance: There is no escaping the hard work of judgment, of aligning generals with particulars. “Facts need testimony to be remembered and trustworthy witnesses to be established in order to find a secure dwelling place in the domain of human affairs.”
That means there is always the chance of being duped by someone who deliberately misreports the world. Lying can—and does—happen everywhere. However, the impulse to dupe substantially increases inside a bureaucratic state, with its layers of self-interested deception and self-deception; the modern analogy would be to a media ecosystem, a hall of mirrors where facts vanish in a haze of linked posts, articles, Facebook pages. Reading official statements about Vietnam in The Pentagon Papers, Arendt feels her own sense of reality slipping away: “The quicksand of lying statements of all sorts, deceptions as well as self-deceptions, is apt to engulf any reader.”
Arendt makes a shrewd point about how such oxygen-poor environments can develop: “Defactualization and [abstract, unreal] problem solving [rather than recognition of facts] were welcomed [within the Pentagon] because disregard of reality was inherent in the policies and goals themselves.” The US government, striving to justify Vietnam, began by believing their own most optimistic projections of what might or what should happen (rather than what did), and ended by duping the American people. Once they lost track of the facts, peddling a faked version of reality came naturally to them.
The deceivers started with self-deception. Probably because of their high station and their astounding self-assurance, they were so convinced of overwhelming success, not on the battlefield but on the grounds of public relations, and so certain of the soundness of their psychological premises about the unlimited possibilities in manipulating people, that they anticipated general belief and victory in the battle for people’s minds. And since they lived anyhow in a defactualized world, they did not find it difficult to pay no more attention to the fact that their audience refused to be convinced than to other facts.
As Anita Loos said of Mary Pickford, they started believing their own press clippings.
Four months in, the new Trump administration is already moving from self-deception and deception on to “image making” and “ideologizing”; it is fast approaching complete “defactualization.” Examples proliferate. On March 18, for example, a New York Times article describes a Trump “finding” that certain Venezuelans are members of a criminal gang (not proven, merely asserted) and that the gang “is” terrorist (also not proven) and hence creating “wartime” (neither proven nor even officially declared) conditions. When pressed to supply evidence of the underlying facts, “the Justice Department filing to the appeals court cited Mr. Trump’s ‘findings’ as the facts by which courts should evaluate the issue.” Defactualization at work: like the declaration that Zelensky is a dictator who went to war with Russia, the banning of the AP from White House press briefings over the “Gulf of America” or President Trump proclaiming to Governor Mills (when she assured him that Maine would “follow state and federal laws”) that “we are the federal law.”
It is noteworthy, though, that these are still attempted defactualizations: The court did not accept Trump’s “findings” in lieu of evidence, Chief Justice Roberts criticized Trump for calling for the judge’s impeachment, Maine’s laws still stand. Arendt’s long view leads her to argue that defactualization of this sort is ultimately doomed.
The liar is defeated by reality, for which there is no substitute; no matter how large the tissue of falsehood that an experienced liar has to offer, it will never be large enough, even if he enlists the help of computers, to cover the immensity of factuality. The liar, who may get away with any number of single falsehoods, will find it impossible to get away with lying on principle. … There always comes the point beyond which lying becomes counterproductive. This point is reached when the audience to which the lies are addressed is forced to disregard altogether the distinguishing line between truth and falsehood in order to be able to survive.
Defactualization met reality in Trump’s first administration repeatedly: Think of COVID. Similar tests will arrive in the next four years. The good news, at least for the long term, is that a factless atmosphere is as corroded (rusted, rickety, and unreliable) as it is corrosive. Arendt offers a persuasive case for why self-deceived liars like Nixon can turn out to be their own worst enemies, whipping up an unsustainable cloudy realm of lies that eventually tumbles down to the old hard factual ground of reality. There will be collateral damage along the way, but the harder we all work to restore a sense of reality in the face of lies and self-deception, the sooner the rebuilding can start.
Trump is worse intentioned than Nixon, and more successful at overwhelming our system of safeguards against tyranny. Like Nixon in 1971, though, he is just beginning to work his dark designs. That makes it significantly easier to mobilize against them, provided we recognize them for what they are. Our practical political challenge, like that faced by Democrats in the early 1970s, is to emerge into reality again with a road map to steer us toward clearings rather than into subsequent dust storms. The move to declare that we are already deeply enmired in an autocracy is much less useful than what Arendt provides: a diagnosis of how defactualization can rise and an account of its innate instability that points out the virtues of keeping a firm eye on reality and steadily working to deny the lie.
The Power Bluff
Arendt’s account of lying in the era of incipient defactualization strikes me as very much in harmony with the various kinds of deceit Harry G. Frankfurt identified in his memorable 1986 essay, “On Bullshit.” It is not enough to divide statements into truths and lies: We need room for the third category of bullshit. Rather than being intended simply to deceive like a lie, bs aims to persuade without regard or even reference to truth.
Frankfurt’s taxonomy of bs starts with an unforgettable anecdote. Ludwig Wittgenstein is told by a convalescing friend, “I feel just like a dog that has been run over.” He replies in disgust, “You don’t know what a dog that has been run over feels like.” Wittgenstein certainly sounds like a jerk (not for the first time), but Frankfurt is sympathetic to his frustration; his friend
cannot be regarded as lying; for she does not presume that she knows the truth, and therefore she cannot be deliberately promulgating a proposition that she presumes to be false: Her statement is grounded neither in a belief that it is true nor, as a lie must be, in a belief that it is not true. It is just this lack of connection to a concern with truth—this indifference to how things really are—that I regard as of the essence of bullshit … Her fault is not that she fails to get things right, but that she is not even trying.
The key is that bs is not concerned with truth or falsity at all, only with persuading the audience; it is a statement designed to win a particular speech situation. That intent, Frankfurt goes on to argue, aligns it with a particular type of deliberate lie:
Bluffing too is typically devoted to conveying something false. Unlike plain lying, however, it is more especially a matter not of falsity but of fakery. This is what accounts for its nearness to bullshit. For the essence of bullshit is not that it is false but that it is phony.
Hard not to think of the flimsiness of bs when considering the executive order attempting to undo birthright citizenship or the baseless “findings” (might they be based on misinterpreted tattoos?) about the Venezuelans the Trump administration wants to deport.
Gessen’s account of the power lie emphasizes the way Trump’s blatant falsehoods demand fealty. Following Arendt’s account of the way that deception and self-deception lead to an atmosphere of defactualization, though, we also ought to stress the bluff and the phoniness around Trump’s usual bs. Just look at the flimsiness of most of the executive orders, their unseaworthiness when tested: Those deported Venezuelans may not belong to a gang, with whom we are not actually at war, a war which does not in fact exist. Like the thousands of spurious—and it is worth recalling, ultimately unsuccessful—lawsuits in 2020 designed to overthrow or undermine the presidential election, these orders and Justice Department moves are closer to a bluff, or its cousin, bluster, than they are to power lies.
Living the Lie
What good exactly is this Arendtian account, bolstered by Frankfurt, of Trump as a bluffer who utters his truth-detached statements in a thickening nimbus of deception and self-deception? To go beyond the “power lie” to find a comprehensive account of what Trump is presently up to, it helps to reconsider the timeline of authoritarianism Vaclav Havel offers in his 1978 essay, “The Power of the Powerless.”
Havel defines the situation that Czechs (not just “dissidents” but all ordinary Czechs) find themselves in: a longstanding and geographically gigantic zone of crushing unreality: “Not only is the dictatorship everywhere based on the same principles and structured in the same way (that is, in the way evolved by the ruling super power), but each country has been completely penetrated by a network of manipulatory instruments controlled by the superpower center and totally subordinated to its interests. … It offers a ready answer to any question whatsoever; it can scarcely be accepted only in part, and accepting it has profound implications for human life.”
His best-known illustration of “living a lie” involves asking what it means to hang a sign upholding Soviet values in your shop window. It is, he says, a way of bending the knee to the manifold and omnipresent surveillance and control:
The manager of a fruit-and-vegetable shop places in his window, among the onions and carrots, the slogan: “Workers of the world, unite!” Why does he do it? … that is the way it has to be. If he were to refuse, there could be trouble. He could be reproached for not having the proper decoration in his window; someone might even accuse him of disloyalty. … It is one of the thousands of details that guarantee him a relatively tranquil life “in harmony with society,” as they say. … The slogan is really a sign, and as such it contains a subliminal but very definite message. Verbally, it might be expressed this way: “I, the greengrocer XY, live here and I know what I must do. I behave in the manner expected of me. I can be depended upon and am beyond reproach. I am obedient and therefore I have the right to be left in peace.” This message, of course, has an addressee: it is directed above, to the greengrocer’s superior, and at the same time it is a shield that protects the greengrocer from potential informers.
Trump aspires to a state of affairs in which lies have to be accepted unquestioningly—or else. But we need to notice the steps he is taking to get there, so that the institutions Arendt relies on (the courts, the press, a mobilized and determined citizenry) can do for our country what they did in 1976: recapture, or better un-capture it. Havel’s account of powerlessness under Czech Soviet rule describes a durable state of affairs that offers only a few ways out. Arendt was only describing small-scale lying within a democracy, while Havel is describing an all-encompassing lie, just what Trump has pounded us with as we enter autocracy. But understanding where we are in the cycle—how far within the zone of defactualization—is crucial.
Does Havel’s account of Czech conditions in 1978 bear on the US in 2025? Yes. But not because it is a match—rather, it gives a glimpse of what our future might bring, if this were to go on and on and on. Havel himself carefully distinguishes what he lives under from “the technique of exercising power in traditional dictatorships, [which] contains a necessary element of improvisation.” What we are watching now—and we should be watching very carefully—is just such improvisation. That’s why Frankfurt’s account not just of bullshit but of bluff (and relatedly bluster) is such an important addendum to Arendt’s anatomy of Nixon-era lying and self-deception.
I am grateful that Timothy Snyder (who has some intellectual affinities with Gessen) has provided one phrase to warn us about what is happening now in response to Trump’s bs: “anticipatory obedience.” Bad as such anticipatory obedience is, though, it is not the only problem. Arendt’s insistence on seeing the facts as they are now (not as we fear they will become if this goes on) helps us see a corollary phenomenon, potentially just as damaging, which we might call anticipatory despair. Anticipatory despair preaches to the choir on the left, assuming we have already fallen into a far deeper pit than has yet been dug (maybe it is the left’s equivalent of the right’s “brokenism).” The dean of Columbia’s journalism school recently told students “Nobody can protect you … these are dangerous times.” When your dean tells you that, it’s not just an empty flourish, it is a definite speech act, an abdication of responsibility by those who can in fact take meaningful actions to protect their students.
the harder we all work to restore a sense of reality in the face of lies and self-deception, the sooner the rebuilding can start.
All across the left, we can see people acting as if we already lived in the turgid miasma of defactualization that Havel was genuinely breathing in 1978. Despairing, and by despairing, giving into the bluff. To the extent that we are willing to state the facts as we know them to be, we still live in the actual world. We still have a judicial system interested in what time a particular plane took off, and when an order reached the government; we still have judges not willing to accept Trump’s “findings” in an executive order as fact. Although Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post will not risk the wrath of the government by printing a 21st-century equivalent of The Pentagon Papers, we do still have newspapers willing to file stories and state facts.
The US in 2025 is neither Vichy France nor Soviet Czechoslovakia. We may, however, still get to the world Havel describes, where various forms of ordinary life will come to seem foolhardy or even rebellious. Havel describes a society where even the silencing of a punk band, Plastic People of the Universe, spoke volumes:
Everyone understood that an attack on the Czech musical underground was an attack on a most elementary and important thing, something that in fact bound everyone together: it was an attack on the very notion of living within the truth, on the real aims of life.
In 2025, however, Trump’s takeover of the Kennedy Center still sparks that most important human reaction in the face of hubris: laughter. People are drawing the inevitable comparisons between Trump and gold-statue-building autocrats elsewhere. Nobody is dying in the street to protect ballet or operas. (And if you reply “yet,” you leave me no choice but to invoke anticipatory despair again.) We can still laugh and resist. Not at the Kennedy Center, but where it matters: successful suits by state AGs and affected parties, leading to judicial rulings freezing parts of Trump’s steaming river of executive orders.
Against Anticipatory Despair
Arendt may have been a pessimist, but she was a clear-eyed one, hopeful even when not optimistic. She ends “Lying in Politics” with a reprisal of her main themes: “deception, self-deception, image making, ideologizing, and defactualization”—and a reminder about their impermanence: “The halfhearted attempts of the government to circumvent Constitutional guarantees and to intimidate those who have made up their minds not to be intimidated, who would rather go to jail than see their liberties nibbled away, are not enough and probably will not be enough to destroy the Republic.”
Arendt was right about Nixon; the Republic stood. Things may yet turn out differently in our own crisis of the republic: Just as Reagan did more damage to the fundamental social safety net that sustains our country than Nixon did, so too Trump has far surpassed Reagan, and made breaches and inroads on civil liberties and freedoms of expression and of basic bodily autonomy that no prior Republican president would have dared.
In the face of deliberate deception—engendering self-deception and leading to full-on defactualization—we can still offer appeals to shared human frailty, and a belief in the durability of truth. Arendt reminds us that even would-be authoritarian lies, with their utter disregard of reality, do not last. It is that disregard of truth, that phoniness, that makes them inherently unstable. By describing the ways in which America in the 1970s (as again in 2025) fell into a crisis, she reminds us that the strong fabric of laws and a palpable American commitment to human equality and diversity are still present, albeit muted and obscured beneath the blanket of lies.
Havel wrote from inside a true authoritarian pit. Those who have been afflicted with anticipatory despair write as if we too were already in an American version: “Nobody can protect you” is a haunting refrain and a self-fulfilling prophecy. Any realistic opposition to Trump now involves countering (to borrow Frankfurt’s terms) bullshit and bluff. Arendt helps us identify the core elements and the essential weakness of a government that has lost touch with reality. She offers the road map that will let us skirt the crumbling edge of the pit they have dug for themselves and whomever else they can drag in. 