Who Can Tell the Emperor When He Has No Clothes? Donald Trump flaunted his elastic conception of truth in an interview with Time—but he may yet learn that facts are stubborn things. Jonathan Ernst / Reuters How can anyone convince the most powerful man in the world of something he does not wish to believe? It’s not an idle question. In a remarkable interview with Time’s Michael Scherer, President Trump flaunted his elastic relationship with truth. Instead of weighing evidence, he explained, he prefers to trust his gut. “I’m a very instinctual person,” he said, “but my instinct turns out to be right.” Trump unrepentantly rehearsed his litany of false or unsubstantiated claims with Scherer. Was Ted Cruz’s father linked to Lee Harvey Oswald? “Why do you say that I have to apologize? I’m just quoting the newspaper.” (The newspaper in question is the National Enquirer.) Had the president tapped his phones? “A lot of information has just been learned, and a lot of information may be learned over the next coming period of time. We will see what happens.” Were there 3 million fraudulent votes cast in 2016? “Well I think I will be proved right about that too.” When Trump believes something, instinctually, there appear to be only three possibilities. He is already correct. He will be proven to have been correct at some point in the future. Or he may simply insist—as in the case of the Iraq War—that he had always subscribed to whatever view is later proven right. As my colleague David Graham put it: Time and again, Scherer asks Trump about statements that he has made without evidence, and time and again, Trump insists that something that happened later retroactively justifies the claims he has made, effectively arguing that lies have been alchemically transformed into truths after the fact. As a political tactic, the refusal to acknowledge any inconvenient fact or contrary claim has its short-term advantages. “Trump has discovered something about epistemology in the 21st century,” Scherer wrote. “The truth may be real, but falsehood often works better.” But this is not a novel discovery, not some peculiar feature of our contemporary environment. “Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it,” the satirist Jonathan Swift wrote in 1710, “so that when Men come to be undeceiv’d, it is too late; the Jest is over, and the Tale has had its Effect.”
Yes, that is why he is president. Reasonable people voted for him because they reasoned that another reasonable president was only going to make things worse.