The first thing I did last Wednesday, after watching the debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump on tape, was to reread the book whose title inspired the title of this page: On Bullshit, by Harry Frankfurt. Its author is a professor of moral philosophy who died last year at the age of 92, after having the pleasure of seeing his little essay become a kind of instruction manual for our political moment. On bullshit It was published almost 20 years ago, but it began to be read with greater attention well into the century, and then, around 2016, with something like frenzy. In Spanish it was published with a cautious title: On quackery. But Frankfurt devotes many fantastic paragraphs to exploring the word bullshitwhich is distinguished from lying, from simple deception and from other forms of dishonesty precisely by the eschatological suggestion: bullshitter or shit-talking not only utters falsehoods, but also excrement, the most disposable of thoughts, the formless waste of human reason.
Donald Trump is a cheap charlatan, of course: in the United States it is common to compare him to a used car salesman, a profession that — perhaps unfairly — has become a metaphor for chatter designed to deceive others and make a profit. The Royal Academy dictionary proposes other options as synonyms for charlatan: trickster, liar, swindler. But none of them has, for me, the force or the expressiveness, or even the semantic richness, of this piece of Colombian slang. We recognize the charlatan not only because he tells lies, but because he says anything; not because he knows what the truth is and wants to disguise it, but because he does not care about the difference between truth and lies: he is willing to say even the most ridiculous, even the most senseless, if that is what he needs at a given moment. What distinguishes him is, as Frankfurt writes, the activity of “making assertions without paying attention to anything other than what is useful to say at that moment.”
For anyone who knew Frankfurt’s essay before last Tuesday, it must have been very difficult not to be reminded of it at various points during the debate. Donald Trump has been a generous provider of snapshots for the history of indignity, textbook narcissism, moral infantilism, or political stupidity, but I think he outdid himself when, mid-debate, he combined all four ingredients to defend himself against an accusation that stung him more than any other. In the course of the debate, Kamala Harris called him a convicted felon, a liar, immoral; she accused him of complicity with America’s enemies; she recalled proven accusations of sexual harassment. But what really offended Trump was when she commented, in the middle of a response about immigration and border issues, that attendees at his rallies — Trump’s — were leaving out of tiredness or boredom.
The show was fascinating. “Let me answer the question about the rallies,” he said to the moderator like a spoiled child. “People don’t go to her rallies, and those who do, it’s because they’re taken on buses and paid.” In her half of the screen, Kamala Harris let her fantastic smile appear on her face for the first time, a smile that meant many things, but above all one thing: “It’s incredible, but she fell for it. I set an obvious trap for her, a childish trap, and she fell for it. Let’s see what happens now.” And what happened was that Trump launched into a deranged monologue that would have delighted Ionesco or Beckett, and which I must transcribe to the best of my meager possibilities: because transcribing is putting order, and order is the most conspicuous absence in the deranged monologues of that poor chaotic head.
“People don’t leave my rallies,” Trump said. “We have the best rallies. People go to my rallies. You know why? Because they want their country back. And what’s going on here, we’re going to end up in World War III, to talk about something else… What they’ve done to our country by allowing millions and millions to come in… Look what’s going on in a lot of towns… A lot of towns don’t want to talk about this because they’re ashamed. In Springfield they’re eating the dogs, the people that are coming in are eating the cats… they’re eating the… they’re eating the pets… of the people that live there. This is what’s happening in our country, and it’s a disgrace. As far as the rallies… as far as… the reason they come is because they like what I say. She’s destroying this country, and if she’s elected president, this country has no chance of success. Not just success. It’s going to end up being Venezuela on steroids.”
Harris’s smile was priceless: dear readers, I ask you to look for it. It is the enormously amused smile of someone who watches the trickster sink into his own delirium. The final debate statistics showed two telling figures: one, Trump talked a lot more; two, he was a lot more defensive. The first interests me, because it is eloquent. The bullshitter is not only the architect of dishonesty: he is also the victim of the need to talk. The answers in a debate like Tuesday’s must meet certain time requirements, the main one of which is not to extend beyond the limit. Sometimes the contenders had two minutes; sometimes, only one. Anyone who has debated seriously, following the rules and respecting the limitations, or anyone who has spoken in public—on television or radio, for example—knows how difficult it is to fill time with pertinent and precise ideas: that is, without talking shit.
In the debate we saw Trump desperate to fill the two minutes given to him, because he neither knew his material nor had studied it, nor had figures or concrete data to support his positions, and too often he had to rudely resort to the most well-known tools of charlatanry. One example is false references: I ran out of patience before finishing the inventory of the number of times that “someone” praised Trump, or “many people” considered him the best, or “many European leaders” said they respected him a lot, or “many economists” praised his plans. Another example is childish and unnecessary hyperbole: Trump is incapable of uttering a sentence without talking about the worst thing that has happened to the country in its entire history, if he talks about Harris, or the greatest thing that has been done in the history of the world, if he talks about himself. One feels like he is trying to sell you a car.
The charlatan (or the windbag, if you prefer) can be a source of laughter, and that is fine. Let us laugh at Trump. But he is also dangerous. The windbag or windbag, says Frankfurt, “does not reject the authority of truth, as the liar does, by opposing it. He simply does not pay attention to it. By virtue of this circumstance, talking shit is a more powerful enemy to truth than lying.” And we have two months of that left, and the next four years. That is without counting the imitators from half the world. Because windbags are everywhere.
#bullshit #campaign