Lies in the service of cruelty
Many years ago — I don’t recall where — I came across a study on the phenomenon of lying. The study identified common categories of lies. The study divided lies by severity, much the way first, second and third degree murder is divided up in certain jurisdictions. A misdemeanour lie could be along the lines of telling someone who showed you their new shoes that you find them attractive when you don’t. Or a lie told by accident because the speaker was misinformed.
The study included common reasons why people tell lies. For example, to avoid embarrassment, to avoid hurting someone’s feelings, in the name of self-aggrandisement, for economic profit, and so on.
One type of lying was so rare that the researchers didn’t give it a category but a footnote. It was lies told in the service of cruelty. For example, someone might invent a negative story about someone else and spread it as office gossip for no reason at all.
I recall one researcher said they’d never seen anything like Trump. Trump tells more lies in the service of cruelty than anyone they had ever studied by several orders of magnitude. Trump could be nearly unique in his appetite for telling cruel lies about specific people. For this reason many people live in mortal terror of him. In this way he is like every high school bully probably anyone has ever known. America has become a bullylcracy.
A symptom of that bullylcracy is a new dress code in Trump’s Washington, and it’s straight out of the Maoist playbook. MAGA fruitcakes are now sporting golden Trump bust lapel pins. I’m not talking about the red-hatted, toothless, out-of-shape detritus that wave Trump flags at his Nuremberg-style rallies or stand along his motorcade routes. I’m talking about members of Congress, Senators, cabinet members, flunkies and hangers-on in the Trump “administration.”
The Trump pin is a golden, garish, unmistakable profile of Trump. Somehow wearing the pin has become a thing. It’s a loyalty test. There’s no rule that you must wear one, but it’s advisable that you do. As in Nazi Germany, there was no rule saying you couldn’t answer the phone “Ja?”, but it was advisable that you answer “Heil Hilter.” The golden pin is the Golden Calf, updated for the twenty-first century.
When you set aside the obvious fruitcakes and fanatics like Marjorie Stupid Greene, I think the Trump pin wearers are precisely the people who live in terror of Trump’s capacity to lie in the service of cruelty. They would rather humiliate themselves to history than risk a dangerous tweet. As in the movie “Blazing Saddles,” they don’t want the Gov to notice, “I didn’t get a harrumph outta that guy.”
Is the Trump lapel pin going to catch on? Probably. Watch Congressional pins get systematically replaced by Trump pins among Republicans in the coming weeks or even days. It’s a nightmare game of musical chairs. You don’t want to be standing without a chair. You don’t want a lie in the service of cruelty to single you out, one in a tweet or a comment from the “president.” For Republicans, that’s more terrifying than the condemnation of history.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.