Trump, Musk, and Authoritarian Lies

In a recent Substack piece, Nobel Prize-winning economist and former New York Times columnist Paul Krugman discusses the “explosion of lies” coming from Donald Trump and Elon Musk lately. The demonstrably false claim that tens of millions of dead people are receiving Social Security checks. The flagrant lie that Ukraine started the war with Russia. The White House’s brazen denial that Elon Musk is running the dodgy government-gutting operation that Musk himself dubbed DOGE. The absurd boast that DOGE has already saved taxpayers $55 billion even though the alleged savings listed on its website add up to only $16.6 billion, half of which reflects a typo.

Krugman speculates that this recent frenzy of lying is “a sign that the Musk/Trump Administration is cracking up after just one month in office.” From the start, DOGE has been a muddled mess of incompetence. So, as Krugman tells it, Trump and Musk’s desperate lies are an attempt to cover up this mess, to distract from the fact that they don’t know what they’re doing.

“Why the frantic lying? I suspect that it is because Musk, Trump, and their Congressional allies are flailing,” Krugman writes. “I don’t think any past administration has ever failed so thoroughly in its first month.”

Krugman is certainly right that the Trump regime’s actions so far have been “shambolic,” representing “a stunning display of incompetence.” However, it’s wishful thinking to interpret this latest barrage of lies as a sign that Trump and Musk recognize that they are failing. That would suggest a modicum of self-reflection and humility—prerequisites for a sense of accountability to the public.

When your whole goal is to break things—in this case, democracy—you don’t need to know what you’re doing. You just need to know how to create mayhem. In this administration, the incompetence is a feature, not a bug. So too are the lies.

Lying is Trump’s oldest trick. He launched his political career on the coattails of an audacious lie and hasn’t stopped lying ever since. Sometimes it’s to amplify grievances and to instigate divisions. Sometimes it’s to create confusion, uncertainty, and suspicion so that people no longer trust their ability to distinguish between fact and fiction. Always to overwhelm and dominate the discourse.

The only difference now is that this time around we get double the duplicity because we have Co-President Musk following the same script: flood the zone with bullshit, unleash a constant chaos of misinformation.

Accustomed to the typical norms of political discourse in a democratic society, the media has always struggled to cover Trump and his lies. To a certain degree, politicians of all stripes have always indulged in some fact-fudging and truth-stretching. But Trump is different not simply because he lies so frequently but also because the lies he tells are often so wildly blatant, so easily debunkable, so toxic, and, yes, so utterly ludicrous.

Even after all these years, the sheer scale of his mendaciousness still throws us for a loop. With each colossal whopper, Trump still has the power to provoke days of breathless commentary. (An added bonus is that when he does tell the truth about his intentions, some people will just brush it off as more trolling.)

The outrageousness of the lies is, of course, the whole point. Trump owes his political success to an instinctive understanding that the key to political dominion is making yourself an inescapable force: dominate the airwaves, commandeer the news cycle, seize and distort the narrative. The more outlandish the things you say, the more publicity you get. With his clownish antics and blitzkreig of inflammatory social media posts, Musk has clearly absorbed Trump’s lessons.

Earlier in history, another political figure perfected that playbook. Notorious for his “phenomenal untruthfulness,” “lack of demonstrable reality in nearly all his utterances,” and “indifference to facts,” in the words of historian Konrad Heiden, Hitler was a pioneer of political propaganda, wielding the willful obfuscation of reality as a type of disinformation warfare.

In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt analyzed how Hitler used systematically repeated lies to manipulate public perception, a tactic shared by other 20th-century authoritarians such as Stalin, who infamously revised history textbooks and doctored photos to promote his own set of alternative facts. The strategy was to construct a fabricated version of reality justifying their ends and the value system underpinning those ends, conditioning people through a relentless propaganda campaign to accept those values and endorse those ends. The ultimate goal was to “seize the power to fit reality to their lies.”

To that end, Hitler understood the importance of first seizing the power of the spotlight. In Mein Kampf, he put the point like this: “It makes no difference whatever whether they laugh at us or revile us … whether they represent us as clowns or criminals; the main thing is that they mention us, that they concern themselves with us again and again.” Chillingly, those words could easily have been uttered by Trump.

Writer and broadcaster Adrian Chiles cited the above quote from Hitler in a short piece published in The Guardian in April 2024. There, he warned of the danger of failing to take ludicrous political leaders seriously, yet cautioned against comparing any modern politician to Hitler. Chiles wrote that assessment, however, long before Trump’s second inauguration.

Now it’s just over a month into Trump’s current term, and the president has already set about to dismantle every independent check on his power, install yes-men to every office, and position himself as above the law and unbound by the Constitution. His unelected henchman Musk, the richest man in the world, is busy infiltrating government agencies and using the social media bullhorn he owns to amplify far-right talking points, meddle in elections, promulgate fake news and conspiracy theories, and suppress criticism. The vice president is a man who apparently approves of calling journalists and political opponents subhuman. He and other members of the administration openly embrace once-fringe reactionaries who argue that American democracy should be replaced by a dictatorship.

Perhaps comparing the Trump regime to the Nazis is not so far-fetched after all.