Lessons from Trump: truth is optional

One of the important lessons that Donald Trump's presidency has taught is that lying is acceptable. Trump made about 30,573 false or misleading claims over the course of his presidency, lying at a rate which seems to be approximately exponential. During October 2020 he averaged 126 lies a day: presumably only limited by his ability to talk fast enough to enough people.

Democracy is built on truth: if politicians can simply lie with no consequence they can subvert democracy to their own ends. So telling the truth, and being forced to tell the truth if need be, is rather important to democracy. Unfortunately this has turned out not to be something that was really enforced: it was just a convention. Trump's vast emission of lies showed this beyond all doubt. Before Trump everyone believed that if a democratically-elected leader simply started spewing out lies they would, somehow, be stopped from doing so because 'democracy would prevail'. Exactly how it would prevail was never clear, and now we know that, in fact democracy will not necessarily prevail.

For now, democracy has prevailed in the US, although it is severely wounded: perhaps mortally so.

Politicians who wish to limit or subvert democracy in other countries, notably the UK, have been paying attention. Boris Johnson is not as copious a liar as Trump, yet, but he has clearly understood that there is now no consequence to lying when it is convenient to him to do so. As one example the johnsonites are interested in suppressing the votes of those who disagree with them. So they are intending to make it mandatory to have ID in order to vote. Critically, such ID will be mandatory only in order to vote: this is not a plan for a general ID card, which would not be discriminatory. This plan, in contrast, will discriminate against the young, the poor, the disorganised and other marginalised groups: groups who, statistically, are less likely to vote for the johnsonites. And the stated justification for this is that there is widespread fraud in elections. Except, of course, there isn't: the whole thing is based on a lie. And it's an obvious lie: it doesn't take much effort to detect. But the johnsonites simply don't care, because they have discovered that lying has no consequence.

And this is the first lesson the johnsonites and others have learned this lesson from Trump: truth is optional.