The ABCs of Trump: Asshole, Bullshitter, Chauvinist, Essays on Life in Trumpworld

By Randolph M. Feezell

     This book is a collection of short essays whose length and shape were formed to fit the requirements of The Oklahoma Observer, a monthly publication of politics and opinion in which nearly all of these pieces originally appeared. 

     The intended audience for these essays is an educated general audience, not my fellow academic philosophers.  I could have called these pieces "philosophical" essays on life in Trumpworld, but they are not all equally "philosophical," and I did not want the title to be off-putting for those whose associations with philosophy may not be positive. 

     Many of these essays are what might be called "applied philosophy," the application of philosophical ways of thinking to current affairs:  Trump and Trumpworld.  When Rudy Giuliani says "Truth isn't truth" it occasions reflection on the propositional meaning of truth.  When French President Emmanuel Macron distinguishes nationalism and patriotism, and Trump endorses nationalism, some conceptual analysis is in order to understand the meaning of the terms.

     The star of the show in many of these pieces is, of course, Donald J. Trump.  Many of the central players in specific pieces, however, are figures in the tradition of western philosophy as well as contemporary thinkers whose work is useful in illuminating Trump's character and actions, his distasteful presence in American political and cultural life, as well as features of life in the Age of Trump.

     The title of this collection pays homage to the first three essays I wrote about Trump.  "Truth Trumps Bullshit" is a straightforward application of Harry Frankfurt's notion of bullshit and his important distinction between the liar, who knows the truth and attempts to deceive us, and the bullshitter, who is unconcerned with truth.  Trump is a bullshitter par excellence.

     According to Aaron James, an asshole is someone who feels entitled to reject common norms of civility and morality in interpersonal relations and is immune to criticism because of this sense of entitlement.

     Trump's chauvinism is expressed in his nationalism, sexism, and racism; it's central to his conduct and policies that lack any broader vision of the human good beyond the interests of whatever tribe or group with which he identifies.

     The references to "asshole, bullshitter, chauvinist" are not meant to be mere eye-catching epithets.  The coarse words are meant to be philosophical references to deeper matters involving truth, moral character, and the scope of moral concern.

     There are some main themes that unify this collection; these themes appear and re-appear throughout the essays:  the vital connection between the personal (character traits, moral and intellectual virtues and vices) and the political (policies and rhetoric); the importance of truth in a democracy and the dangers of a political leader unconcerned with truth; the value of reasonableness and inquiry in individual and social life; Trump's moral and intellectual unfitness to be president; the worth of philosophy in understanding and evaluating current events; the profound significance of Socrates' notion of wisdom as epistemic humility.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Randolph M. Feezell
• Release date: Aug 4, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393085591

Randolph M. Feezell

Randolphh M. Feezell is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, Creighton University, Omaha, Nebraska.  He is the author of several books, including Faith, Freedom, and Value:  Introductory Philosophical Dialogues, Westview Press (1989), Routledge (2020); How Should I Live?  Philosophical Conversations about Moral Life (with Curtis Hancock), Paragon House (1991); Coaching for Character: Reclaiming the Principles of Sportsmanship (with Craig Clifford), Human Kinetics (1997); Sport and Character, Human Kinetics (2010); Sport, Play, and Ethical Reflection, University of Illinois Press (2004); Sport, Philosophy, and Good Lives, University of Nebraska Press (2013); Playing Games: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Sport Through Dialogue, Routledge (2017).  He is also the author of numerous articles and book reviews, as well as being an award winning teacher and scholar.

Book preview

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Arnold Hamilton, editor of The Oklahoma Observer for permission to use original and slightly revised versions of the short essays that appear in this book. Most of the essays were first published in The Observer. I would also like to thank him for giving me the opportunity to pursue, in a more sustained way, a less academic form of writing directed toward a general audience. Thanks to Barb for reading these essays, listening, processing words, and insightful suggestions along the way. Thanks to family and friends for comments and encouraging words. Finally, thanks to Donald J. Trump for being such a fecund source of material – a gift that keeps on giving for a philosophically inclined writer.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Part One: Trump

Truth Trumps Bullshit

The Orificial Trump

The ABCs of Trump

Trump, Cognitive Biases, and Self-Delusion

Was the No Collusion Conclusion Good for Country?

Trump and the Death of Integrity

Orwell and Trump

Policy, Party, Person

What I Learned on My Coronavirus Vacation

The Preacher, the Politician, and the Scientist

Conspiracism and Trump

Part Two: Trumpworld

Epistemology

The Ethics of Belief in the Age of Trump

Politics and the Meaning of Truth

Nationalism and Patriotism

Nationalism, Patriotism, and Trump

The Simple Patriot

Language

Political Profanity and the Ethics of Speech

On Being Offended in Trump’s America

On Political Correctness

Pronouns and Politics

Religion

Godism in American Life

Why Do Nonbelievers Face Prejudice in America?

Politics

Anger, Politics, and Pluralism

An Open Letter to Uncle Joe

Books

The Death of Truth?

Lying and Cheating as a Way of Life

Sports

On the Contrary, Sports are Just Games

The Day Sports Died

Introduction

This book is a collection of short essays whose length and shape were formed to fit the requirements of The Oklahoma Observer, a monthly publication of politics and opinion in which nearly all of these pieces originally appeared. They are longer than the typical op-ed pieces published in major newspapers but shorter than feature articles that appear in major magazines. Unlike academic articles they contain no endnotes or footnotes, because the Observer doesn’t allow such clutter. When I include quotations from other sources I attempt to make the references clear, but I do not include the specific pagination. If readers want to know more information about references they may contact me at [e-mail].

The intended audience for these essays is an educated general audience, not my fellow academic philosophers. I could have called these pieces philosophical essays on life in Trumpworld, but they are not all equally philosophical, and I did not want the title to be off-putting for those whose associations with philosophy may not be positive. My wife, for example, associates philosophy with such an airy level of abstraction that it could have little to do with the way she thinks or how she lives. On the other hand, she read these essays with interest, offered insightful comments, and tolerated the high-falutin references and discussion central to many of them.

Many of these essays are what might be called applied philosophy, the application of philosophical ways of thinking to current affairs: Trump and Trumpworld. When Rudy Giuliani says Truth isn’t truth it occasions reflection on the propositional meaning of truth. When French President Emmanuel Macron distinguishes nationalism and patriotism, and Trump endorses nationalism, some conceptual analysis is in order to understand the meaning of the terms.

The star of the show in many of these pieces is, of course, Donald J. Trump. Many of the central players in specific pieces, however, are figures in the tradition of western philosophy as well as contemporary thinkers whose work is useful in illuminating Trump’s character and actions, his distasteful presence in American political and cultural life, as well as features of life in the Age of Trump.

The title of this collection pays homage to the first three essays I wrote about Trump. Truth Trumps Bullshit is a straightforward application of Harry Frankfurt’s notion of bullshit and his important distinction between the liar, who knows the truth and attempts to deceive us, and the bullshitter, who is unconcerned with truth. Trump is a bullshitter par excellence.

According to Aaron James, an asshole is someone who feels entitled to reject common norms of civility and morality in interpersonal relations and is immune to criticism because of this sense of entitlement.

Trump’s chauvinism is expressed in his nationalism, sexism, and racism; it’s central to his conduct and policies that lack any broader version of the human good beyond the interests of whatever tribe or group with which he identifies.

The references to asshole, bullshitter, chauvinist are not meant to be mere eye-catching epithets. The coarse words are meant to be philosophical references to deeper matters involving truth, moral character, and the scope of moral concern.

The reference to Trumpworld is somewhat vague, but useful. The essays were written between February 2017, when the shock of Trump’s election was still present, and the summer of 2020 when the coronavirus, responses to police brutality, and the upcoming contest between Biden and Trump were heavy on our minds. In almost all of these pieces Trump has some role to play: as the central object of discussion, as an important background presence, or as a figure deserving a mention that reminds the reader of his relevance.

The loosest sense of Trumpworld refers to the Age of Trump in a temporal rather than a political or cultural sense, 2017-2020. I include two pieces on sports and make no attempt to relate them to Trump and NFL players kneeling for the national anthem or his criticisms and middle school name-calling directed toward specific athletes.

I also include two book review essays that are more or less directly related to Trump and Trumpworld. One book examines the troubling decline of respect for truth-directed, fact-gathering institutions, such as science and journalism; the other describes Trump’s pathetic and comic behavior as a serial golf cheater, as well as a liar who attempts to glorify his status as a golfer. His golf-related behavior reveals his character better than his Barnum and Bailey rallies.

There are some main themes that unify this collection; these themes appear and re-appear throughout the essays: the vital connection between the personal (character traits, moral and intellectual virtues and vices) and the political (policies and rhetoric); the importance of truth in a democracy and the dangers of a political leader unconcerned with truth; the value of reasonableness and inquiry in individual and social life; Trump’s moral and intellectual unfitness to be president; the worth of philosophy in understanding and evaluating current events; the profound significance of Socrates’ notion of wisdom as epistemic humility.

I hope the Age of Trump will soon pass. But the questions I discuss here will be with us well beyond Trump. Vestiges of Trumpworld will survive his political demise. Questions about truth, reason, science, moral character, self-knowledge, patriotism, the ethics of speech, political correctness, religious belief, the nature of the emotions, and sport will continue to be relevant when Trump’s presidency is but a bad memory that forced us to attend acutely to threats to our democracy and to the foibles of contemporary life. While life in Trumpworld occasions the thinking in these essays, I do not believe they are mere period pieces. As Camus insisted, the rats are always among us.

Part One: Trump

Truth Trumps Bullshit

For many, it has not been hard to put a finger on what is so disturbing about our friend, Donald Trump. He is egocentric, xenophobic, disrespectful to women, and remarkably ignorant about the world, or at least about the world beyond big-time real estate deals. He’s thin-skinned, intolerant, and seems to lack a kind of basic sensitivity to other persons. These claims are old news. Even Trump supporters might agree that he has his flaws, but he can pull off the Big Deal – and make America great again! The MVP in the Super Bowl might be a wife-beater, but he’s a winner. For those of us who still believe that character matters and that personal depth is related to political wisdom-however naïve that may appear to seasoned political operatives – our disappointment is intense. How could such a man become POTUS?

There’s something else about Trump that has been missed, not because it has been hidden or ignored, but because commentators and writers have lacked the appropriate concept to capture this part of Trump’s character and his approach to the world. And this aspect of the Trump Phenomenon despoils our politics in a distinctive way.

It was hard to watch the Republican debates, but when we did what was noteworthy wasn’t simply Trump’s lack of civility, braggadocio, or the way that political argument was transformed into ad hominem attacks. How to put it? He just said things, whatever seemed to be rhetorically self-serving, without thought or apparent concern about whether his claims were true. Of course, politicians often distort opponents’ views or take statements out of context, but as the campaign progressed I sensed that there was something quite different about Trumpian gas. My local newspaper seemed to be running fact-check stories every other day. Given the atmosphere in which the liberal media were being attacked for the way they reported on the campaign, these fact-check stories were obligated to engage in a kind of moral equivalence, scrutinizing the Clinton campaign for falsehoods, indirection, and sophistry. Yet most observers thought that the Trump campaign – and especially its candidate – was the more egregious fact-violator.

It would be somewhat tedious to list all of the false claims made by Trump, but recall a few notable pronouncements. He had a long and sorry history as a Birther when he began his presidential campaign, so his claim that Barack Obama was born in Africa should head the list. He said he opposed the Iraq War. He made false claims about the real unemployment rate, the level of taxes in the United States compared with the rest of the world, crime rates in American inner cities, and Hillary Clinton’s lack of a childcare plan. When he finally acknowledged that our President was born in the United States, he simply moved to other falsehoods: Hillary Clinton’s campaign was responsible for spreading the rumor and now Trump had ended it. By late September, many were saying what we suspected. A Los Angeles Times story used the L word. The title of the piece was, Trump’s Lies are Unprecedented for a Modern Candidate. The journalist said, Never in modern presidential politics has a major candidate made false statements as routinely as Trump has. A pivotal point was when the usually judicious The New York Times ran an editorial in which the writer, expressing the views of the editorial board, referred to Trump’s lies. After the election Trump tweeted: In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally. There was no evidence of widespread voter fraud. The New York Times referred to Trump’s claim as a lie, with an editorial titled, Mr. Trump Lies about the Vote.

Did we elect a serial liar? I recall listening to an NPR interview with a New York Times editor who was called upon to explain and defend the use of liar and lies to refer to Trump and his falsehoods. But I didn’t think that was quite right. He’s a blowhard and a braggart, that’s clear, and he’s verbally careless. The issue is whether he was intentionally trying to deceive us. Note that I can say something to you that isn’t true, but that doesn’t make me a liar. I may think that I’m telling you the truth, but I may be mistaken. As philosophers might say, uttering a falsehood is a necessary condition of lying, but it’s not sufficient. In judging that someone lies or is a liar, someone habitually making false statements, we are also saying something about a person’s state of mind. What is he doing? What is he up to? Perhaps The New York Times assumed, as most of us do, that if we can independently do the research to find out what is true or what the facts are, then we have good reason to label Trump’s falsehoods as lies and Trump as a liar. We hope that if we point out the facts to the liar we might shame him (or her) into acknowledging the truth, changing his linguistic behavior, getting him back in line. In being held accountable for what he says, the liar is, in a sense, held hostage by the truth – at least we hope this is the case. We assume that the value of inquiry will prevail, especially in a democratic society with a free press. We need fact-checkers to keep the commissars honest. Alas, we were now doubly naïve.

What we found out is that the truth doesn’t seem to matter to Mr. Trump. He made his claims, was called out, questioned at the debates and criticized in the newspapers and on line, yet the pattern of untruths persisted. Evidently, we were wrong about his state of mind. He doesn’t care about getting things right. He seems unconcerned with truth. Finally, it dawned on me. I realized what it is about Trump that was distinctive, disturbing, and unnoticed. He’s a bullshitter, not a liar! And we have a beautifully wrought sketch of him in Harry Frankfurt’s notorious essay, On Bullshit.

Frankfurt was a long-time philosophy professor at Yale (not a stand-up comedian). Evidently he first read a version of his essay in 1986 for a Yale interdisciplinary discussion group, published it in a journal, included it in a collection of fine philosophical essays, and finally published it as a stand-alone little volume (Princeton University Press, 2005). The essay is not a joke. It’s both serious conceptual analysis (which philosophers often do) and insightful cultural criticism. Among academic philosophers the essay is well-known and widely discussed. I ask those of you who might be mildly offended by the indelicate use of the term to overlook the coarseness of the language and to focus on the cultural phenomenon to which the term refers. Here’s how Frankfurt begins his analysis of bullshit. One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit. Everyone knows this. Each of us contributes his share. But we tend to take the situation for granted. Most people are rather confident of their ability to recognize bullshit and to avoid being taken in by it. So the phenomenon has not aroused much deliberate concern, nor attracted much sustained inquiry. He admits that bullshit is often used quite loosely yet he insists that it is possible to say something helpful about the core meaning of bullshit. As he mentions, when we think of bullshit we tend to think of advertising and public relations, or we are reminded of the spin room after vapid political debates. (I confess, as a sports fan, I think of sports talk radio.) His analysis is nuanced in parts, but the central idea is fairly clear. It depends on the distinction between the liar and the bullshitter, as I have already suggested.

According to Frankfurt the difference between the bullshitter and the liar rests in their respective states of mind. They are both involved in misrepresenting