President Donald Trump cannot stop lying. His philosophy, if you can call it that, is that the truth is what he, the most important person, wants it to be. It’s remarkable how long someone in power can get away with denying reality, but reality has a way of eventually catching up with even the most important of us.
The United States is now politically unstable from the stress of undergoing the last three Presidential elections, with Trump anchoring each of his campaigns on lies. There was the famous phone call with President Zelensky where Trump tried to get Zelensky to agree to lie about Biden. Then, when he lost the second election Trump spearheaded a campaign of lies that the election had been rigged against him, culminating in his inciting a violent insurrection on January 6, 2021. Since he was re-elected he abused his powers to pardon all the insurrectionists, so, in effect, anyone who commits crimes based on his lies gets a get out of jail free card as long as Trump is president!
Truth is an ideal that we share in common through our daily communication. By trusting others, we take truth to be the default, and we make human cooperation possible. Of course, some people deceive others just to further their own interests - and the more this happens the less we trust each other.
Central to all moral systems is the prohibition of lying. Honouring the truth is a lynchpin of morality. If lying were tolerated, wrongdoers could get away with anything by lying about what they did, or shifting the blame onto others, as indeed, Trump is doing.
When politicians make a habit of lying then they are actively eroding the moral system. Spreading lies about immigrants, saying that they are “eating the dogs”, is a preparation for dehumanizing and abusing them. Seeking to excerpt power over a group by discrimination and coercion is ultimately a rejection of morality and an embrace of “might makes right”. When this happens morality breaks down and human cooperation breaks down with it. We are back in the jungle.
In the last year, during his third Presidential campaign there have been two attempts to assassinate Trump. Then there was an attempt on a Democratic governor’s life, and just two weeks ago, the murder of a Minnisota state legislator and her husband and attempted murder of another. In the meantime Trump is not trying at all to tamp down the rhetoric and bring people together, no, he is actively inciting more violence by sending Ice officials after undocumented immigrants and hoping that the people in blue states will try to physically stop Ice officials so that he can claim an insurrection as an excuse for calling in the national guard and the marines, against the wishes of the civic authorities and the majority of the people in those states.
Violence has been growing in America every year Trump has been in office and it is directly fueled by Trump’s malicious lies about immigrants and his political rivals. His lies are not only destabilizing America, they are destabilizing the globe. Heads of state are too scared to call out his lies, so it falls on everyone else, all the “unimportant people” to do so.
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