Benjamin Hart at New York magazine interviewed Daniel Dale, the Toronto Star reporter who has made a career of documenting Donald Trump’s lies (sometimes live on Twitter). Here are a couple of questions and answers that I found interesting:
After observing him so closely, do you think that’s true of most his lying — that it’s strategic? Or is just a reflex because he’s been doing this his whole life?
I think most of it is nonstrategic. He says things like, “My father was born in Germany,” and you’re just like, “Why? What is the point of that?” I think something that distinguishes Trump from other political liars or dissemblers is how trivial and needless many of the lies are. These are not lies about him being caught in a scandal and trying to spin his way out, or where he’s trying to win some policy debate. A lot of it is just like Trump being Trump in ridiculous ways. To the extent that there’s a strategy, I think it’s often him just trying to escape a given ten seconds. Maggie Haberman has noted that he tries to escape or win a particular transactional exchange with no regard to what he said in the past, no regard to what he might have to say ten seconds or ten minutes in the future. He’s just trying to get out of the moment. It’s pretty remarkable to witness.
This is a question that comes up whenever we deal with someone who consistently doesn’t tell the truth: Do you think Trump believes most of his lies in the moment he tells them, or do you think he’s consciously aware that he’s not telling the truth?
A: There are a lot of cases where I feel like I can tell that he knows he’s making it up. And there’s some where he clearly knows. One example that comes to mind: At campaign rallies, for a while he’d be bashing the media and he would look to the cameras in the back of the room and point and be like, “Look at that, CNN just turned its camera off. You see, the red light just went on …”
Of course, that didn’t happen. That has never happened, to my knowledge. CNN has never angrily turned off its camera when he was criticizing CNN or the media. And so he’s literally looking his supporters in the eye and pointing at something in the room that is not happening and telling them that it’s happening. And so for people who say, “Oh, he believes all these, he’s just delusional,” I think there are cases like that where he’s clearly deliberately making it up.
(July 2015 photo via wikipedia.)
