Yes Trump Lies To You, But the Democrats Make You Lie To Yourself

He Gave Us Our Freedom

Just after the Velvet Revolution that swept the Communists away from power in Czechoslovakia, my friend Jonathan and I headed off to the capital of what is now the Czech Republic, Prague, in the early 1990s.

We were excited to visit a city that we both had been enamoured with, despite neither of us ever having been there. It met – indeed fulfilled – our expectations. The clock, the bridge, the palace, the alleyways, the people. Actual Prague in actual spring. It was mesmerising.

We stayed in a walled, courtyarded house, the home of an independent church pastor and his family. Kind, gentle, conservative; they had lived through the tumult of an oppressive regime, then out to the other side into the freedom that the country now has.

As we sat eating a meal with the family, I noticed a large poster of Czech President, Vaclav Havel, on the kitchen door. He was looking impassively over at us as we ate, his sandy hair, glasses and moustache larger than life.

Havel had been a famous dissident poet who had suffered much for the sake of freedom and human rights. It was only natural that he become president when Communism fell. Destiny even.

I had to ask. Here was the non-conformist, holiness movement, pacifist family from a church background not given to political involvement, yet with a picture – and of a dominating size at that –  of the hard-smoking, hard-womanising, atheist politician watching over their every meal. Listening in to every conversation. Gazing down on their ideas and thoughts.

“Simple,” was the broken English reply, “He gave us our freedom.”

Trump-Free-Zone

Derren Brown’s painting of Trump 2018

When it comes to my credentials about politics – US politics at least – I am Trump-washed. There’s no Trump-stain on me. Search my blog posts. See my attitude historically. I am a Trump-free zone in the sense that anything I’ve ever written about him is pretty negative. Go have a look, it’s all there. Google me.

I even got scorched in my own church on Christmas Day 2017 by a visiting pastor who told me how angry he was that I had rejected the notion that Trump was God’s plan to keep America safe.

I’m not big on narcissists, either in church and ministry settings (and goodness knows they exist), or any other setting. They have so many unredeeming, and quite frankly, unredeemable features.

But I’m not here to have the gloryometer run over me to ensure that I am pure in the eyes of Trump haters. I no more need your approval today than I needed the approval of the visiting pastor at my church.

My attitude to Trump is similar to the likes of the former – and still in my eyes one of the three greatest – Australian Prime Ministers, John Howard, who believes Trump lacks the character to be President of the United States.

John Howard once famously said of an Opposition leader, Kim Beasley, when asked if he were a true rival to Howard’s role: “Hasn’t got the ticker!” 

True, in retrospect. I don’t think Beazley was attack-dog enough to be Prime Minister.

But here’s what Beazley didn’t lack – and that’s clear from his long career as Opposition Leader, Defence Minister, Australian Ambassador to the US, and head of the Australian War Memorial,  – character.  Beazley had character in spades. Still does.

Yet, and this is where it gets complicated, Trump lacks the character to be the President, so I’m with John Howard on that. But, equally, the Democrats lack the character to be the ruling party.

Lies, Lies, Lies

As my blog post title notes: Trump lies to you, it’s second nature to him to tell big fat, juicy, outrageous click-bait lies. Some of them land. Some of them do not.

But here’s what we are learning about the Democrats, indeed many of the increasingly post-liberal progressive parties of the West today: they are more concerned to make you lie to yourself, than to tell you outright lies themselves.

It’s obvious that Trump lies. He says stuff all the time that is outrageous, divisive, and intended to keep his enemies on the back foot. Watch any number of Kamala Harris rallies, and the key topic of conversation is Trump.  As Oscar Wilde observed, the only thing worse than being talked about, is not being talked about.

But the Democrats? Wouldn’t matter if it were Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, or some other duo, the party it seems, is increasingly there, to make you lie to yourself. And they have an effective machine to enforce that, ably backed up by the likes of The New York Times.

So for example, when it was obvious to just about everyone (and including me, painfully, as I’ve had relatives go through this), that Joe Biden was in terminal cognitive decline, anyone who said so was pounced upon. Publicly and painfully.

It was Republican shrill. It was ageism and ableism. It was blah, blah, blah. What it wasn’t, was true.  Even The New York Times own Ezra Klein bore the brunt of this abuse when he broached the topic.  Here’s former editor, Jill Abramson, admitting as much to The Washington Times:

The Biden White House clearly succeeded in a massive cover-up of the degree of the president’s feebleness and his serious physical decline, which may be simply the result of old age,” Ms. Abramson said. “Shame on the White House press corps for not [having] pierced the veil of secrecy surrounding the president.” But then she let out the truth while apparently failing to realize how big her admission was. “I worry that too many journalists didn’t try to get the story because they did not want to be accused of helping elect Donald Trump.”

Yet when the decline became obvious, or was at least allowed to be declared obvious with no retribution and it was clear that Kamala Harris would be nominated, the likes of The New York Times rejected every protestation from the Biden camp that he was good to go for another four. He was done. Not because he said so, but because they said so.

Put together, that is the very definition of propaganda: “You must say what we say until we say otherwise, and when we do eventually say otherwise, you must forget the notion that we ever said what we had first said. Scrub it from your minds.”

And here’s another article from 2023 that has aged even worse than Biden himself, from the equally left-leaning Newsweek:

The most telling evidence of Trump’s growing dementia is found in his paranoid thirst for revenge, on which he is now centering his entire campaign…Biden may appear frail at times, but he’s rational. The growing evidence of Trump’s dementia and paranoia, on the other hand, poses a potential danger to the future of America—if he’s reelected. At the least, the media should be investigating and reporting on it.

Which brings us back to Vaclav Havel.

Biden, Trump, Havel. It sullies the great poet’s name to put these men in the same category. But Havel’s famous essay on power from 1978, when things were especially dark for Eastern Europeans, is worth a quote.  I’ve quoted it often before, but it seems eerily prescient in these times. It’s called The Power of the Powerless, and you can read it online here.

The whole piece is a worthy read, but it is his famous example in Section III of the greengrocer living in the land of the permanent revolution that is most revealing.  Havel posits this scenario:

The manager of a fruit-and-vegetable shop places in his window, among the onions and carrots, the slogan: “Workers of the world, unite!” Why does he do it? What is he trying to communicate to the world? Is he genuinely enthusiastic about the idea of unity among the workers of the world? Is his enthusiasm so great that he feels an irrepressible impulse to acquaint the public with his ideals? Has he really given more than a moment’s thought to how such a unification might occur and what it would mean?

I think it can safely be assumed that the overwhelming majority of shopkeepers never think about the slogans they put in their windows, nor do they use them to express their real opinions. That poster was delivered to our greengrocer from the enterprise headquarters along with the onions and carrots. He put them all into the window simply because it has been done that way for years, because everyone does it, and because that is the way it has to be. If he were to refuse, there could be trouble. He could be reproached for not having the proper decoration in his window; someone might even accuse him of disloyalty. He does it because these things must be done if one is to get along in life. It is one of the thousands of details that guarantee him a relatively tranquil life “in harmony with society,” as they say.

I hope you can see where this thing is going.

Havel goes on:

The smaller a dictatorship and the less stratified by modernization the society under it, the more directly the will of the dictator can be exercised- In other words, the dictator can employ more or less naked discipline, avoiding the complex processes of relating to the world and of self justification which ideology involves. But the more complex the mechanisms of power become, the larger and more stratified the society they embrace, and the longer they have operated historically, the more individuals must be connected to them from outside, and the greater the importance attached to the ideological excuse.

Simply put, the modern West has relatively little to fear from naked totalitarianism. Why? Because of the sheer complexity of the modern West and its shibboleths.

I say this to church groups that I speak to. Christianity in a post-Christian West will never be jackbooted out of the public square. That would be too gauche. Too obvious. That would be telling lies to us. And that’s so 1978. No, we will self-censor and self-suffocate and self-deceive in order, as Havel says, “to be guaranteed a tranquil life ‘in harmony with society'”. 

We live in the time of the complex dictatorships that are so embedded in the technologies and institutions that they create a life – or lives – of their own. And in order to get by, we usually put up with their lies. Their lies are so embedded and so required, that they become the air we breathe.

Hence the risible idea that Trump was going to Madison Square Gardens to re-enact 1939 is exactly that, risible. Now he indeed may act in a totalitarian way, and as a narcissist there’s every chance he wants to. But let’s face it, ceding power to the states on abortion doesn’t lend itself in that direction.  Trump will lie to you, even while the platforms from which he messages, and which message him, pull against conformity and dependence.

But the Democrats? They’re like Havel’s greengrocer. They’ll make you lie to yourself. They’ll utilise every indirect instrument of manipulation to ensure that you line up for the sake of a peaceful life. Ask every student at a university in the USA who just wants to graduate. Ask every conservative Christian trying to get by in a Big Four law firm.

Does Ernst and Young’s HR department really care whether in your heart of hearts you believe that trans-men are real men? Nope. They don’t care at all, or at least not as much as they should if it truly is – as Biden famously claimed in 2021- , “the civil rights issue of our day.”

What EY does care about however, is the ubiquity of that rainbow lanyard among all staff. That poster confirming that we are all allies here. That DEI presentation that you must attend and must fill in online with answers that won’t allow you to go to the next page and complete unless you fill “the right” response.

Or ask my friend whose daughters place basketball in New South Wales, and who every year have to fill in “Gender Assigned at Birth” on the yearly application forms. That’s a greengrocer moment right there.

I mean, he could phone the state basketball association and complain. He could. But why would he? Who can be bothered to try and chase down the new public reality in order to refute its lies? So he puts his sign into his greengrocer window, sighs, shrugs his shoulders and gets on with life.

Eventually, in order to get by, we’ll all shrug our shoulders and conform. We won’t – or don’t – really believe it in our heart of hearts, and nor do our neighbours. And nor do any except the most shrill of ideologues, but we will line up nonetheless.  We won’t publicly be permitted to declare what a woman is or isn’t, but we will have to vote to allow such a creature to have autonomy over her body.

Even today there are Democrats saying that an issue as minor as “trans kids in sport” that dominated an election, should never have reached that level of opprobrium. And they’re right on one level. As Camilla Long in The Times says today:

On trans, [Trump] knew Harris had no comeback. Even if she’d denounced Joe Biden’s executive order, made on day one in 2021, rolling back anti-trans laws, there was the problem that her vice-presidential pick, Tim Walz, had turned Minnesota into a “trans refuge”. He signed a law saying children could be taken away from their parents if the parents didn’t agree their child should receive “gender-affirming care”.

Long is hardly a friend of orthodox Christianity, or conservative politics for that matter, but she goes on in more strident terms:

To put it another way: in a choice between having your p@#$y grabbed, or having your child stolen and sterilised by the state, almost every woman in the country is going to choose the former. Why couldn’t the Democrats see this?

Why? Because they refused to. To do so would have brought down the whole edifice.

Ah, Tim Walz, or Uncle Tim, or Coach Walz, the man who played up the hokey-distant-relative-who’s-in town-for-a-visit-schtick, that the likes of The New York Times lapped up. They laughed themselves silly when he called JD Vance “weird”. They presented him as the man who you’d want to have over to dinner, when in reality he had as much as admitted that he would send over other men at dinner, to knock on the door and take your child away.

It’s “Workers Of the World Unite” at twenty paces. This man played the authoritarian card far harder than Trump could ever do. He didn’t have to lie for himself. He had a whole machine to do the dirty work for him.

But with Trump’s win, the spell is broken. Even the liberal media outlets are, mostly and belatedly, pointing out just how things had gone too far and how they’ll learn their lesson by the time 2028 comes around. And how they’ll get out more and speak to those who they have seemingly forgotten. In other words, all the stuff that they promised they’d do back in 2016, and never once did.

There’s another word for such a broken promise: A lie.

Trump will lie to you. Big fat, greasy, obvious lies that stick in your craw. And the Democrats? Unless they learn some sharp painful lessons, they’ll teach you to lie to yourself. Lies that, at the outset, are big, fat and greasy too. But lies, that with enough time, media messaging and massaging, and that are harder to negate when your livelihood or your family is at stake, you’ll begin to find easier to swallow.

Such lies may slide past your craw easily enough, but they will, over time, build up a level of toxicity and sit queasily in your stomach. You’ll never be sure if you should rush to the toilet and vomit, or hold on until the nausea passes.

Havel gave the Czech people their freedom. Freedom not just from obvious tyranny, but the tyranny of having to lie to themselves in the manner of the greengrocer.  My hope is that the checks and balances of government in the USA will temper and restrict Trump’s unchecked lies long enough, to allow the same for the people of the USA, and indeed across the West.

Which is why, in the end, enough people of Christian stock in the USA who disliked Trump and were put off by his ungodliness, held their noses and voted for the obvious liar. I know that many Christians who are into what I call “voter-purity culture” are shocked and angered by that fact. And I know – or have heard of – many inner city progressive evangelicals (that’s a thing apparently) who are dismayed and discombobulated by Kamala’s loss.

To the former I would say don’t be a day late and a dollar short when it comes to reassessing why people did vote for Trump even if they reject his clearly awful, and narcissistic, character.

If the likes of The New York Times can write “Ah I can see why” mea culpas then so too can you. Get off your high horse. Risk your Op-Ed contract with the liberal media for once. Get ahead of the curve and give people the wiggle room to deal with the reality of earthly politics.

And to the latter I would ask, which part of the Democrats’ vision of what it actually means to be a human do you believe aligns with how God views human life? Where would the line be drawn at which you would say “Enough is enough?”  Behind that smiling progressive face is a grimacing skull that has been busy dismantling creation reality and issuing you with a siren call to lie to yourself. And left unchecked, you just might.

To both groups I would say, live not by lies. Neither the lies that are told to you, nor the lies that you tell yourself.