Outside the Beltway

Seeing Double on Doubling Down

Resisting gaslighting must be social. It's crucial for those who oppose Trump's falsehoods to remind each other, again and again, that 2 + 2 = 4.

Michael Bailey · Monday, June 2, 2025 · 12 comments

Our country’s shockingly quick slide into oligarchic illiberalism and corruption is predicated on lying and falsehood. True, the politics of our era has been shaped by several complex, far-reaching causes—geographic, historical, and systemic–but a crucial and immediate driving force is Donald Trump and his MAGA supporters’ disregard for truth. This untethering of speech from verifiable reality takes many expressions: cutting off funding for basic research, scrubbing ideologically inconvenient facts from government websites, the repetition of slogans to conjure a new reality (“Gulf of America,” “Lock Her Up!”), and, of course, old-fashioned falsehoods and flat-out lies.

These falsehoods don’t just distort policy; they also reshape the electorate’s sense of what is legitimate, what is fair, what is constitutional. In time, they will inevitably deform Trump’s opponents as much as his followers. And when that corruption is complete, the republic will be lost—and likely beyond restoration.

This reflection on Trump’s lies will persuade no one who doesn’t already believe its central thesis, and it offers little revelation to those who already do. But gaslighting is a social phenomenon, and resisting gaslighting must also be social. It’s crucial for those who oppose Trump’s falsehoods to remind each other, again and again, that 2 + 2 still equals 4.

In that spirit—of shared high-heartedness, vigilance, and a continuing commitment to the preservation of our republic—I offer these thoughts for your contemplation. For those who already know what this article asserts—which I assume is the overwhelming majority of this readership—think of this as going to church. Most people don’t go to church for conversion. They go for the reminder. What’s needed now is not fatalism, but a spirit of resolve—a readiness to fight both because of and despite what’s happening.

Stating the obvious—again and again—is an important part of that fight.

Donald Trump’s One Rhetorical Consistency

President Trump was recently dubbed “TACO”—short for Trump Always Chickens Out—a nickname invented by financial columnist Robert Armstrong. It paints Trump as spineless and full of hot air. Unsurprisingly, the President was not amused.

Trump wants to be seen as predictably strong: principled, firm, and unwavering—a bold America First warrior who only negotiates strategically and for the public good. The nickname “TACO” suggests the opposite: a neat pattern of bluster followed by retreat.

As much as one might experience schadenfreude from watching Trump’s titanic—and titanically fragile—ego take a bump on the nose, we must admit the nickname oversimplifies. “TACO” swings too far in depicting Trump as predictable. If you’ve watched the chaos of his tariff policies, his pandemic messaging, or his bizarre (but temporary?) obsession with acquiring Greenland, you know: Trump doesn’t follow any discernible script. He zigs and zags endlessly, often to the chagrin of markets, allies, and his own underlings. He’s chaotic. Whether that chaos is part of a grand master plan, as his defenders claim, or not, one thing is clear: Trump is perfectly at ease in the maelstrom.

That said, he is predictable in one specific way: he cannot admit being wrong. Or mistaken. Or dishonest. And he’s mistaken and dishonest. A lot. 

He grabs onto a claim—no matter how outlandish—like a pit bull and won’t let go. He doubles, triples, and quadruples down. The range, audacity, and persistence of his lies are unlike anything we’ve seen in modern American politics—rivaled only by fringe figures like James Traficant or George Santos.

Lying has always been part of politics. But Trump has mastered a comparatively rarer kind of lie: the lie made in full view of contrary evidence. Here lies the central difference between Trump and the charlatans mentioned above: Traficant and Santos were marginal players. Trump, by contrast, is the political behemoth of our time, and he has turned lying into his essential power tool.

But All Politicians Lie, Right?

Lying has always been endemic to public life—and to private life as well. But over the past decade, Donald Trump’s rhetoric has introduced us to a more unsettling variety as a normal feature of politics: the brazen, uncorrected lie delivered in plain view of contrary facts. And that kind of lie is relatively unusual—not just in politics, but in human experience. Bald-faced lying results in negative and predictable consequences often enough to dissuade many who would be tempted to succumb to that path. That’s partly why we are drawn to television shows about fraudsters such as Elizabeth Holmes–it’s difficult for us to fathom the kind of thinking that motivates them.  

Before 2015, in my Introduction to American Government course, I used to run a word-association exercise early in the semester. I’d say a word and ask students to call out the first word that came to mind. When I said “politician” or “politics,” the most common responses were “liar” or some variation of it. Then I’d ask students to think of actual, specific lies that politicians had told—not just wrong opinions, but demonstrable or demonstrable-adjacent falsehoods. I told them I doubted they could come up with ten.

Many classes came up with none. Sometimes a student would just write “Watergate” or “Clinton” or “Obama.” On average, they’d identify one or maybe two lies.

The students were cynical. And cynicism is healthy—up to a point. But this was cheap cynicism: an all-purpose skepticism about politics, unsupported by actual evidence or memory. It wasn’t sharpening their awareness or heightening their vigilance; it was ebbing away their civic spirit. If you’re convinced all politicians lie but can’t name a single lie, that’s not fighting the good fight—it’s surrender. That kind attitude shapes whether you vote, whether you consider pursuing public service, whether you think politics is worth the trouble.

Cheap cynicism does no one much good.

I no longer run that exercise. In the past ten years, the problem has changed. Students today are either fatalistic or strangely trusting. Our epistemic world hasn’t just fractured; it has sealed into separate, almost airlocked realities.

Some Varieties of Lying—and What Makes Trump Different

Consider the variety of lies we encounter in both politics and everyday life. To illustrate, imagine being caught with your hand in the cookie jar—witnessed, no less. You don’t want to admit wrongdoing, so you have many means to misrepresent reality:

Obfuscation: “It depends on what you mean by cookie jar. And hand. And cookie.”

President Bill Clinton provided the modern classic of this genre with: “It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is,” while trying to dodge questions about Monica Lewinsky.

Rationalization: “I was just counting the cookies.”

This one is familiar in politics: the after-the-fact justification that is not impossible but stinks to high heaven. No one can perfectly read motives, so the rationalizer takes refuge in how the mind is buffered from observation.

Feigning Ignorance: “Wait, that’s against the rules?”

It’s hard to prove what someone didn’t know. Trump claimed ignorance in the 2024 campaign about the contents of Project 2025—a plan being drafted by his own allies to reshape the federal government. It’s possible he didn’t know about it. It’s also deeply unlikely.

Feigning Memory Loss: “I don’t recall.”

 Obviously, this is a courtroom favorite. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, for instance, claimed she couldn’t remember whether she had urged Trump to declare martial law after the 2020 election. That’s a hard thing to forget—unless forgetting is the point.

Flat-out Denial: “I didn’t do it.”

See also: “I did not have sexual relations with that woman.”

Gaslighting / Reverse Accusation:
“My hand isn’t in the cookie jar; YOUR hand is in the cookie jar.” Or even: “There was no cookie jar.”

 This is the rarest—and most corrosive—form of lying. It doesn’t just deflect blame; it rewrites reality.

These aren’t the only tools in the liar’s kit. One can lie by omission (See: Biden’s cognitive decline), ask misleading questions, invoke sham authority, or—in the mode philosopher Harry Frankfurt calls bullshit—simply speak with indifference to the truth. And, as one can tell from the examples above, no party has a monopoly on lying. 

Trump uses all of these forms. But what sets him apart from previous presidents is not just the unprecedented volume of his lies. It’s his comfort with the most extreme ones—the ones that erode the very possibility of shared reality. When caught, he doesn’t retreat. He leans in. Standing firm in the face of facts becomes a display of dominance. Among his base, capitulation, not falsehood, is the real sin. While I haven’t come across specific studies on the role of strength and weakness in Trump’s rhetoric—particularly as criteria for what is admirable or contemptible—I have little doubt that this strong/weak binary is at the core of  his moral framework.

Truthfulness, when truth is foisted upon Trump by his opponents, becomes a sign of weakness. And lying, done defiantly, becomes performative heroism–a show of resolve, a power move that outrages opponents. It also ties up the media (and academics) in knots, and delights supporters. It’s less about persuasion than provocation. It’s about strength. It’s about not capitulating to opponents.  

And it works.

A Rough Typology of Trump’s Doubling Down

One could also make a plausible case that a unique feature of Trump’s lying is his behavior after the falsehood is exposed.  Most politicians backtrack when caught–they offer a lame apology, or try to redefine what they meant. Trump instead often chooses a different path: escalation. Here are a few forms that his doubling down have taken, together with some examples presented in no particular order.

Doubling Down on Wrongdoing

• Harvard Retaliation Letter: When Trump’s team wrote a letter earlier this year demanding Harvard take a number of steps in line with the administration’s preferences, it turned out the letter hadn’t been formally approved–it was sent prematurely. No matter—Trump didn’t care whether it was authorized. He amplified the demand anyway, became angered when Harvard refused its demands, and escalated his attacks.
• Kilmar Abrego Garcia Deportation: In a high-profile case, Trump has simply ignored the Supreme Court’s ruling calling for Trump to facilitate Gardia’s return. Trump has claimed that, even though the deportation (kidnapping?) was accidental, it was justified. 
• Muslim Ban: In his first term, when judges ruled against his initial January 2017 executive order, Trump reissued essentially the same policy in March, changing only a few cosmetics. Only after this order was stayed by the courts did Trump issue a third ban in September that was upheld by the courts
• His 2016 so-called “Locker Room Talk”: Here’s a summary. 
• 2019 Zelensky Call: “The call with President Zelensky was perfect.”
• His Responsibility in the January 6th Insurrection. 

Doubling Down on Misinformation

• Sharpiegate: This episode is too ridiculous to explain. Feel free to read a summary of it here. 
• “Obamagate”: Trump promoted a so-called scandal implicating Barack Obama in spying on his campaign. No evidence has ever emerged. Frankly I’m assuming that’s what Obamagate refers to since its meaning was never clear. 
• 2017 Inauguration Crowd Size. This was a full-team effort involving Sean Spicer, Kellyanne Conway, and the President. Size matters a lot for Trump. 
• 2016 Election Lies: Trump held that he won the popular vote. He did not. (Trump’s implicit recognition that legitimacy and the popular vote are essentially linked is reason No. 1,009 for replacing the Electoral College with a popular vote.)
• 2020 Election Lies: The clearest and most destructive example, a lie that resulted in the January 6 riot. There were audits and recounts. Fox retracted its claims about the Dominion machines. Dinesh D’Souza has admitted that the so-called smoking gun of 2000 Mules was a big ol’ bust. Pillow guy has never found quite the right moment to bring forth the evidence. And yet Trump persists. Trump’s shamelessness is fascinating and socially catastrophic all at once.
• The Obama “Birther” Nonsense: Trump relentlessly pushed this conspiracy theory for years even after it was definitively debunked. In one of the very few occasions when Trump publicly retracted a statement, he did the most Trumpian thing ever–he declared victory. The man’s got sand, I’ll grant him that. As reported by the Associated Press: 

“As the GOP presidential nominee sought to put that false conspiracy theory to rest, he stoked another, claiming the “birther movement” was begun by his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton. There is no evidence that is true. “Hillary Clinton and her campaign of 2008 started the birther controversy. I finished it,” Trump said. 

Doubling Down on Broken Promises

• “Mexico will pay for the wall”: This was a core campaign promise. It never happened.
• Repealing Obamacare “on day one”: The repeal failed repeatedly, even under unified Republican control. Yet Trump insisted he’d “essentially” done it anyway.
• “A beautiful healthcare plan”: Repeatedly promised, never delivered.
• Releasing his taxes. Trump claimed he couldn’t release his taxes because they were being audited. The IRS contradicted him.

Doubling Down on Discrediting Critics

• Without verifiable evidence, Trump has ascribed corruption, fraud, bad faith, or national security threats and the like to the following: Robert Mueller, James Comey, Federal judges, Colleges and universities, Law firms challenging his policies

Trump’s pattern of behavior is the same: don’t engage critics in good faith—delegitimize them.

Doubling Down on his Expertise

This is where Trump’s personal style fully merges with political strategy. Consider Trump’s recurring refrain: “Nobody knows [X] better than me.” Nobody knows more than Trump about technology. Or taxes. Or trade. Or windmills. Or infrastructure. Or ISIS. And so on and so forth. Apparently the man is omniscient. 

You’ve seen the compilation clips of these kinds of statements–it’s a running joke. Nonetheless, Trump’s grandiosity, no matter how buffoonish, reveals his compulsive need to claim total superiority in all areas.  It’s the kind of rhetoric that would make Louis XIV proud. 

From Lies to Bullshit

Most people, when they lie, do so with some awareness of the truth. As philosopher Harry Frankfurt put it in his well-known essay On Bullshit, liars still care about the truth—enough to hide it. But bullshitters don’t. They aren’t trying to obscure reality; they just don’t care whether their words correspond to anything real at all. The words of a bullshitter aren’t aimed at describing reality; they’re intended to manipulate, to advance the speaker’s interests. 

Many of Trump’s lies often fall into this category. They’re not carefully wrought. They’re not calculated. Many are not even plausible–I’m going out on a limb and guessing that President Biden was not assassinated in 2020 and replaced by a robotic clone.  

Trump is a con man. When the truth serves his interests, he tells it. When it doesn’t, he doesn’t. He seems indifferent either way.

Here’s a small but telling example. On September 10, 2018, President Trump tweeted: “The GDP Rate (4.2%) is higher than the Unemployment Rate (3.9%) for the first time in over 100 years!” I remember reading that and being momentarily impressed—it sounded like a noteworthy economic milestone, however esoteric it might seem. But something felt off. Wait, wasn’t that a fairly regular occurrence in the 1960s?

It’s not the easiest fact to look up directly, but you can find it by plotting GDP and unemployment rates together. I did, and sure enough: while it’s unusual in the sluggish-growth 21st century, it was common in the 20th. It last happened in 2000. Trump’s claim wasn’t just exaggerated—it was flatly wrong. But who apart from nerds have the motivation to check?

Here’s another, equally trivial example. On July 29, 2018, Trump tweeted: “Wow, highest Poll Numbers in the history of the Republican Party! That includes Honest Abe Lincoln and Ronald Reagan.” He gave no source. On the day he tweeted that, his average approval rating was just under 40 percent. Republican presidents like Eisenhower, Nixon, Reagan, and both Bushes all posted significantly higher approval ratings. Even if we take him to mean his approval strictly among Republicans, the statement still crumbles under scrutiny–public opinion polling didn’t exist during Lincoln’s presidency. Just more nonsense. 

In both cases, Trump’s aim wasn’t to present admirable true information; it was to be seen as dominant. Whether what he says is true doesn’t seem to matter. What matters is that he says it with confidence, and that his supporters repeat it.

But Is Any of This a Problem?

Donald Trump gets his dates wrong about GDP growth compared to unemployment. So what? He brags about being an expert on any number of things. So what? We all know he’s a former real estate developer and reality TV star—the consummate salesman. And that’s what salesmen do.

Part of being an adult citizen in a capitalist society is learning to buffer oneself from the nonsense claims all around us. Language can be playful and exaggerated and a source of amusement. Most can be safely ignored. Not every boast or blunder is worth getting one’s proverbial panties in a twist.

Consider Elf, the Will Ferrell movie. His character bursts into a coffee shop like an ecstatic golden retriever, thrilled by the cafe’s neon sign proclaiming: “World’s Best Cup of Coffee!” He shouts, “You did it! Congratulations!” The humor, of course, is that he hasn’t yet been jaded by our culture’s endless hyperbole.

What Trump’s opponents see as grotesque bloviating, his supporters seem to view as the political equivalent to a sign proclaiming the “world’s best cup of coffee.” Others still find this part of Trump to be endearing or hilarious. They see his exaggerations not as lies but as showmanship. His rallies have the over-the-top energy and bluster of professional wrestling—complete with gaudy spectacle and free-wheeling claims.  Part and parcel of that brand of aesthetic is hyperbole. Maybe Trump’s critics need to smoke their reefer and chillax.

And truthfully, this position isn’t entirely wrong. It makes little sense to erupt with rage at every utterance. Barack Obama aimed for full paragraphs in his rhetoric; Trump aims for soundbites and sensation. And if we measure rhetoric by its power to stir a crowd, Trump is the more effective speaker. Not a more polished or intelligent or eloquent or substantive speaker–just more impactful. 

But the presidency is not a rally—or at least, it shouldn’t be. And fidelity to reality still matters. Strangely, it now feels necessary to say this plainly: facts still matter.

They matter instrumentally. The purpose of government, after all, is to preserve some existing good or bring about a future good. Policies are supposed to solve problems. But meaningful solutions require at least a minimal respect for reality. If a president proposes a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist, or misdiagnoses a real one, policy collapses into performance.

It matters that most economists agree Trump’s tariff programs threaten to harm economic growth and increase inflationary pressure. It matters that he falsely claimed Ukraine started the war with Russia; that distortion shapes how we support Ukraine and what kind of peace we consider acceptable. It matters that he mischaracterizes the January 6 insurrection and its participants. If he recognized the harm they caused, he wouldn’t have pardoned them.

Second, dealing with chronic falsehood corrupts democratic discourse. James Madison once imagined a politics governed by “the mild voice of reason,” pleading for our “permanent and enlarged interests.” Of course, Madison knew full well that this was more aspiration than norm. Politics is messy. Sausage-making, deal-making, log-rolling—all standard fare in a democracy. But even amid the mess, some guardrails matter: bribery is wrong, voter fraud is wrong, and so is intentionally misleading the public for personal gain.

How ought we respond to a false claim? We gather evidence, we offer facts. But that takes time and effort. Steve Bannon described their strategy bluntly: “flood the zone.” By flooding our discourse with outlandish claims, Trump makes good-faith debate nearly impossible. It’s perplexing to know how to engage someone as an opponent rather than an enemy if they refuse the basic rules of engagement. The Democrats seem no closer today in figuring out how to respond to Trump than they did in 2016. 

To borrow from Seinfeld: Trump keeps taking us “to the Hamptons.” In that classic episode, George lies to his ex-fiancée’s parents, claiming he owns a house in the Hamptons. They don’t believe him, so he calls their bluff. “Let’s go right now,” he says. And because they’re just as nuts as he is, they call his bluff. They get in the car, prepared to drive all the way just to prove him wrong. They’re crazy—but so is he.

When Trump takes us to the Hamptons, he knows we will drop out before we get there. We have lives to live and limited time. 

Keeping up with the flooded zone is utterly exhausting. 

It’s both a little crazy and a little crazy-making to treat Trump’s false claims as if they were made in good faith. But refusing to engage them at all feels to me like surrender. And that’s the dilemma I feel, and I suspect many of you feel as well: in a liberal democracy, preserving the truth often requires doing the exhausting work of defending the obvious.

Trump’s technique forces his opponents to either waste time stating the obvious or risk looking like they’ve ceded the point. Meanwhile, people like Kilmar Abrego Garcia are still imprisoned in El Salvador, and Trump still flouts the authority of the U.S. Supreme Court. But we’ve moved on—onward to the next outrageous claim.

And more and more it feels like we’re moving past the next red line. Defiance of the Courts? Done. Ignoring the prerogatives of Congress? Done. 

Counter Arguments from Trump’s Supporters

Trump’s defenders often say his critics take him literally but not seriously. He may get the details wrong, but he’s directionally correct. So what if he misrepresented information to the South African president? The point, they say, was to draw attention to a real problem. 

There’s some truth to this. All of us, at some point, have held on to a broader point even if our evidence is unpersuasive. But that only holds if the general claim is at least roughly grounded in reality.

And in many of Trump’s claims, the entire premise is false. There is no white displacement. Trump lost the 2020 election. Canada is not royally screwing the United States. Most immigrants are not criminals. And in other cases—like the claim of “genocide” against white South African farmers—the truth of the claim is entirely dependent on the truth of the supporting facts. So getting it wrong matters.

Another defense his supporters advance is that we’re misreading the type of action Trump is performing. He’s negotiating. His wildest statements are meant to throw opponents off balance, to draw them out. He doesn’t really want Canada to be our 51st state—come on. His opponents are just humorless scolds who can’t appreciate a much-needed unconventional approach.

A friend of mine in academia is deeply confident that he can discern when Trump is serious and when is trolling. He’s wholly confident that Trump has no interest in Canada becoming the 51st state. But I’m not so sure. Was Trump serious when he claimed…

• that the U.S. should annex Greenland?
• that Obama was born in Kenya?
• that Obama wiretapped him?
• that he won the popular vote in 2016?
• that he deserves a third term?

I opened this reflection by saying we are descending into an oligarchic illiberalism. I used these broad and vague terms instead of a host of other possibilities because we don’t know what holds Trump’s thoughts together apart from what boosts Trump’s ego. Nobody really knows what Trump believes—not his followers, not his staff, not our allies abroad, and certainly not his opponents. And he seems to like it that way. Apparently Trump feels a thrill in the chaos, a feeling of total freedom from accountability, of never being pinned down. But that’s not the mindset of a democratic leader. It’s the ethos of a con man.

Would you want your boss, your colleagues, your dentist, your rabbi, or your spouse to speak this way? Constantly evasive, unmoored from fact, playing games with serious issues? Probably not.

And if we wouldn’t accept that in our everyday relationships, why accept it from a president?

A Last Thought

When we normalize lying, we become complicit in it. Historian Timothy Snyder puts it simply: “You submit to tyranny when you renounce the difference between what you want to hear and what is actually the case.”

It’s tempting to give in to reassuring rhetoric that props up our side. It feels good to hear that our side is always right, that we’re the heroes and the other side the villains. But if we abandon truth—even when truth inconveniently runs counter to our interests and identities—we lose our grip on reality. And with it, we lose our ability to govern ourselves collectively as a free people and as rational agents as individuals.