By Bobby Sample
MS NOW’s Lawrence O’Donnell detailed last night how no one believes in any of Donald Trump’s deadlines for his war in Iran, because clearly he has lied about this before again and again.
O’Donnell highlights the phrase “If you want to know the truth” as the convicted fraudster’s “tell” when you can be sure that he is lying.
Whatever you say, Lawrence. Most of us assume that the president’s primary lying tell is when his upper lip separates from his bottom lip.
We can list any number of phrases this con man uses to signal lies: “People are saying,” “like no one has ever seen before,” and “trust me” spring to mind. What is “perfect” or “beautiful” is sure to be the opposite, and his repetitious use of “very” rarely precedes an accurate description of anything. There’s no challenge in catching this guy out, given his cartoonish array of catchphrases that routinely announce his cons.
In his book Telling Lies: Clues to Deceit in the Marketplace, Politics, and Marriage, psychologist Paul Ekman lists these more generalized “Verbal Cues to Deceit” that mark a liar like a generous coat of orange makeup:
- Careless Errors: These arise when the liar has failed to plan ahead well enough for their fabrication, or just doesn’t choose their words carefully enough to sell the lie.
- Slips of the Tongue: What we’d also call a “Freudian slip,” because Sigmund Freud, in his Psychopathology of Everyday Life, claimed that common mistakes in speech uncover hidden truths the speaker wouldn’t mention on purpose.
- Tirades: Overcome by emotion, the liar has a big outburst in response to fear and stress.
- Circumlocutious and indirect speech: A liar might cover a topic vaguely and go off on unrelated tangents to evade the truth.
If there’s ever a World Cup of Obviousness awarded, we might expect Ekman to snag a nomination. But then again, about a quarter of our fellow Americans either fail to spot or choose to ignore some fairly obvious examples of the Tells of Trump (peg them to Ekman’s list however you like):
- The famous word salads, in which he talks around a subject randomly in a string of sentence fragments, non-sequiturs, and thoughts he is unable to complete.
- “Accidentally” blurting truths that he normally refutes, such as saying “Russia helped me get elected,” or illustrating how corrupt the media is by saying, as if to brag on his own untruths, “If I say a thing five times, they’ll write it.”
- Sudden and shockingly childish attacks on journalists when they get anywhere near one of the topics he lies about the most, such as, most recently, his tantrum and walkout on Sunday’s Meet the Press.
We wish the True Believers who remain in Trump’s cult of personality would start noticing these things independently and honestly, as it rarely helps to share the facts with them ourselves.
But for now, their levels of belief may still be beside the point for the right-wing power players who use MAGA for their purposes.
As Daniel Dale indicates in “Donald Trump Voters: We Like the President’s Lies,” for the University of Notre Dame’s Truth in Politics blog in 2020, there’s an element of fun in embracing Trump’s constant lies as just the rabble-rousing, nose-thumbing, and middle-finger-flipping that his supporters voted for.
Maybe this hints at a solution to that frustrating mystery of how so many Americans could vote so stupidly, and seemingly against their own values beginning in 2016, only to carry on acting as the willing marks of this same conman in 2026.
If you want to know the truth — all they wanted was bullshit.
Bobby Sample works with Dunes City Indivisible, the Oregon Coast Indivisible Alliance and the COIN Comms Team.