The truth behind Donald Trump's lies is that he isn't interested in improving the lives of Americans at all — only his own. Dr Victoria Fielding reports.
DONALD TRUMP'S PRESIDENCY is built on a foundation of lies. Trump’s lies have become so prolific, so big and so enabled by the lying sycophants he surrounds himself with that he now exists in a dangerous artificial reality — an artificial reality where huge arbitrary tariffs on all your trading partners is a "a very beautiful thing".
It is hard to remember the good old days when a political lie was something considered scandalous and reputationally damaging. These were the days when political information was mediated and there was at least some fact-checking and verification by gatekeepers before information was broadcast to the masses.
These were also the days when conservative media resembled news rather than campaign machines — when they disincentivised lying rather than creating lies to advance their right-wing campaigns. Lies also used to be considered problematic before social media created a flood of lies too thick and murky to wade through. Trump has benefited from both these media phenomena and my oh my, how he has taken advantage.
Trump’s entire political career has been one lie after the other — a fire hydrant of small, medium-sized and huge lies, lies told to hide other lies, lies told to confuse, to attack, to undermine, to pretend he is something he’s not, to cover up for what he’s done, to justify the unjustifiable, to shirk responsibility, to avoid consequences, to confuse people about what is true, to make them stop trying to tell the difference between lies and reality.
Trump’s lies have made him the world’s biggest and most powerful liar. He has made lying such a political art form that, rather than damaging his political credibility, lies are Trump’s potent political weapon. When children are taught not to lie, they’re told the story of the boy who cried “wolf” to highlight the dire consequences of not being trusted anymore. Trump lies so much that he is expected to lie, so when he does it is not considered special, out of the usual, or problematic.
Trump also works to undermine trust in anyone who might call his lies out. He attacks his opponents. He attacks the justice system. He attacks the mainstream media, as does conservative media, claiming they are “fake news” when they report his lies. This anti-media campaign has ratcheted up in his second term to the point where journalists who try to scrutinise him are banned from his press conferences.
Trump also turns everyone around him into liars, or perhaps chooses people to work for him who are also born liars. His allies have to accept his lies to show they are loyal to him. This ensures that when Trump lies, they just repeat his lies rather than calling him out. They also lie to cover up his, as well as their own, corruption and incompetence. In this respect, the Republican Administration has developed a culture of lying.
This culture was on display when National Security Advisor Mike Waltz and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth were reported to have included The Atlantic's editor, Jeffrey Goldberg, on their Signal group chat where they discussed classified war plans. In having this extreme incompetence pointed out, they both went into lie mode to cover their tracks. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and CIA Director John Ratcliffe also lied to shirk responsibility for the Signal scandal.
The outcome of all this mutual lying and the absence of anyone calling out these lies is that, as ridiculous as it might sound, Trump has created his own little artificial reality for himself. He watches his lies repeated back to him on conservative media. His supporters on social media eat up his lies, particularly the ones that feed their prejudices. All the people around him never call him out. He lives in a dangerous bunker of lies which he made so strong it is impervious to facts.
This is how we have reached a point as a global community where the President of the United States – formally the most powerful democracy in the world – has swung a wrecking ball through international trade and, in turn, the health of the U.S. and international economies through the imposition of nonsensical tariffs.
These tariffs, which are as high as 34 per cent for China, were calculated using a laughably ridiculous back-of-an-envelope formula that divided a country’s trade deficit by their imports to come up with a tariff percentage. Trump announced these tariffs on "Liberation Day", falsely calling them “reciprocal” tariffs when they’re nothing of the sort. He has also lied constantly to his supporters about what exactly tariffs are. It might be amusing if it weren’t so serious and horrifying.
The only way a policy this extreme, this economically destructive, this irrational can happen is because Trump – safe within his Republican culture of lying, safe in his bunker of lies – used the tariff policy as a lie to cover up the biggest lie of all.
Trump has promised his cult-like supporters that he would “make America great again” (MAGA)– which included a promise of economic revitalisation to reverse the ill-effects of globalisation. Trump was, of course, lying when he said he could unscramble the egg of globalisation. He was lying when he said any attempts to unscramble it would not hurt the economy.
And then we finally get to the truth. Trump is a liar because the truth is, he is a tiny little man, a tiny puny little conman who will say and do anything to hide the fact that he has no idea what he is doing, cannot deliver on anything he has promised and cannot fix the things he has promised to fix. The truth is, he is not really interested in improving the lives of his supporters — he is only interested in securing his own power to grow his and his billionaire mates' wealth. No wonder he has to lie all the time.
Dr Victoria Fielding is an Independent Australia columnist. You can follow her on Threads @drvicfielding or Bluesky @drvicfielding.bsky.social.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Australia License
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