By LARS J. KRISTIANSEN &BERND KAUSSLER
1. Introduction
On June 16th, 2015, Donald J. Trump announced his bid for the
U.S. presidency. Having teased a presidential run for nearly three
decades, boasting to Oprah Winfrey already in 1988 that “I would
never want to rule it out totally… and if I did decide to [run for
president]… I would say that I would have a hell of a chance of
winning” (OWN 2015), Trump put speculations about his political
aspirations to rest as he announced his intention to seek the Repub-
lican presidential nomination during a press conference hosted in
the lobby of Trump Tower. A political neophyte without previous
governmental experience, Trump favored showmanship over
substance and tenuously enlisted his wealth, in addition to an
insipid display of exaggerated patriotism, as visual stand-ins for
aptitude. Stepping up to the microphone, positioning himself
between an assemblage of neatly arranged American flags and a
podium embellished with his name and campaign slogan, the
former Apprentice host delivered an off-the-cuff address covering
topics as diverse as the economy, international trade, tax reform,
health care, immigration, and terrorism. Roughly fifteen minutes
after making his opening remarks, awkwardly pausing for dra-
matic effect, Trump declared: “Ladies and gentlemen, I am offi-
cially running for president of the United States and we are going
to make our country great again” (C-SPAN 2015).
Reactions to Trump’s campaign announcement were mixed.
Conservative commentators were generally favorable in their
assessments of Trump’s candidacy while their liberal counterparts
expressed misgivings about Trump’s qualifications and tempera-
ment, avidly decrying his lack of both. FOX News (2015), alt-
hough painting Trump as an “undeniable element of surprise”
(para. 6), describing his demeanor as “brash” (para. 19), nonethe-
less lauded his business acumen and offered that “he could be an
aggressive—and interesting—player on the primary debate stage”
(para. 8), even if running an “against-the-odds campaign” (para.
1). Applauding Trump’s outspokenness, Sean Hannity argued that
“I am glad Donald Trump is in this race. I like his outsider’s view
of politics… I like anybody who is not politically correct” (Adams
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2015, para. 18). MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, in contrast, ques-
tioned the legitimacy of Trump’s announcement by interrogating
whether his presidential bid was anything more than a PR stunt
(Arana 2015). The Huffington Post, a leftist news blog, followed
suit by likening Trump’s speech to a “rambling” piece of “perfor-
mance art” (Bobic 2015, para. 1). More damning, perhaps, were
reports from non-partisan groups such as The Annenberg Public
Policy Center who accused Trump of playing fast and loose with
facts (Jackson 2015). Yet, because Trump was deemed a spectacle
bereft of substance, concern swiftly gave way to ridicule and The
Huffington Post declared, on July 17th, 2015, that:
we have decided we won’t report on Trump’s campaign as part of
The Huffington Post’s political coverage. Instead, we will cover
his campaign as part of our Entertainment section. Our reason is
simple: Trump’s campaign is a sideshow. We won’t take the bait.
If you are interested in what The Donald has to say, you’ll find it
next to our stories on the Kardashians and The Bachelorette.
(Grim & Shea 2015, para. 1)
While the novelty of Trump’s campaign announcement gen-
erated headlines, his callous and confrontational approach to pub-
lic address commanded the greater number of column inches. An
armchair critic with a profound disregard for political decorum and
a diminutive concern for careful deliberation, Trump’s rhetorical
style mirrored that of a populist demagogue rather than a serious
presidential candidate. Under the guise of eschewing political
correctness, of merely “telling it like it is”, Trump hurled insults
not only at the Obama administration but also his fellow Republi-
cans while simultaneously bolstering his business endeavors and
deal-making skills. More sinister, however, was Trump’s reliance
upon divisive rhetoric and racist tropes as he maliciously lambast-
ed Mexican immigrants by shrewdly preying on the fears of the
far-right: “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending
their best… They’re sending people that have lots of problems,
and they’re bringing those problems with us [sic]. They’re bring-
ing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I
assume, are good people” (C-SPAN 2015). Peddling sentiments
hat effectively would have rendered traditional candidates une-
lectable, Trump’s uncouth address set the tone for a ramshackle
presidential campaign that ultimately landed him the presidency.
Following his campaign announcement, and his subsequent
ascent to the office itself, Trump has been described as a bully
(Shafer 2017), a clown (Taibbi 2015), a temperamental child
(Brooks 2017), a know-nothing (Bernstein 2017), and a national
embarrassment (Cox 2015). James even claims that Trump is an
asshole (2016). While the goal of this essay is not to assess the
accuracy of these depictions, collectively they point to an undeni-
able conclusion: Donald Trump is a controversial figure. Though
the above portrayals might all enjoy some level of accuracy, we
suggest that a more productive description is that of Trump as a
“bullshitter” or “bullshit artist”. Below we demonstrate how
Trump’s rhetorical style, while interspersed with other deceptive
tactics, is fundamentally rooted in what Frankfurt (2005) and
others term ‘bullshit’. More precisely, we examine how “bull-
shit”—when crafted and circulated by the president of the United
States—influences international relations and foreign policy mak-
ing. In order to productively examine Donald Trump’s rhetoric, it
is first necessary to understand the historical context that gave rise
to Trump and into which his rhetorical utterances were inserted.
2. “Post-truth” and “alternative facts”
In 2016, The Oxford English Dictionary’s word of the year was
‘post-truth’ (Wang 2016). Denoting “circumstances in which
objective facts are less influential in shaping political debate or
public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief” (Ox-
ford English Dictionary 2017), thereby sharing striking similarities
with Stephen Colbert’s neologism ‘truthiness’, defined as “the
quality of seeming or being felt to be true, even if not necessarily
true” (Oxford English Dictionary 2017), ‘post-truth’ has cemented
its place in the popular vernacular. Expanding the term’s defini-
tional parameters by giving it an eerily Orwellian twist, Kellyanne
Conway seamlessly coupled “post-truth” and Trumpism during an
interview with NBC’s Chuck Todd. Defending former press secre-
tary Sean Spicer’s claim that Trump’s inauguration proceedings
gathered “the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration,
period” (Stelter 2017, para. 3), Conway argued that Spicer—and
the Trump administration by extension—only sought to correct
misleading media narratives by supplying their own set of “alter-
native facts”. While arguments about the size of Trump’s inaugu-
ral crowd ultimately are of limited import, Conway’s and Spicer’s
vacillation toward blatant fabrication is not. Their wanton disre-
gard for factual reporting, as well as their proclivity for publicizing
easily discreditable nonsense, not only undermines the credibility
of the executive branch but also provides worrying insight into the
president’s character and motives. Appearances, one might con-
clude, matter a great deal more to President Trump than does
accuracy. In discussing the relationship between “post-truth”
reasoning and politics, and in so doing capturing the ethos of the
Trump administration rather poignantly, Will Fish explains that
“post-truth” rhetors generally display
a willingness to issue warnings regardless of whether there is any
real sense of events being likely to come about, or make promises
that there is no real commitment to keeping, or make claims there
is no real reason to believe are true, all for the purpose of gaining
electoral advantage. (2016, p. 211)
Granted, truth is a complicated concept. Historically derived,
contextually informed, subjectively determined, and ultimately
distorted by innate inadequacies in the human sensory apparatus,
the establishing of truth—or falsity for that matter—is a difficult
proposition (Kuhn 1962). In the realm of human activity, where
strict syllogistic reasoning is the exception rather than the rule,
formal logic has been eclipsed by more pragmatic and contextually
anchored reasoning frameworks. Following the postmodern turn,
which brought to light the cultural, historical, and political situat-
edness of not only human subjectivity but of knowledge produc-
tion itself, formal logic has been recast as an unattainable ideal
rather than a dependable implement for argument (Ward 1996).
While this does not mean that any conclusion can be drawn from
any type of evidence, “post-truth” rhetors nonetheless seek to
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exploit this insight by claiming that veracity is fundamentally a
subjective endeavor. Yet, as Frankfurt offers, “[t]here is a dimen-
sion of reality into which even the boldest—or the laziest—
indulgence of subjectivity cannot dare to intrude” (2006, p. 26).
In the political arena, where truth routinely is determined by
majority rule and consensus frequently trumps facticity, “post-
truth” appeals and arguments produce noteworthy problems. A
functioning democracy, after all, requires that voters are granted
unhindered access to accurate, reliable, and truthful information.
“Post-truth” rhetors, however, do not view the sanctity of the
democratic enterprise as a top priority. Their goal is winning
elections by securing competitive advantage and any tactic that
might help ensure victory is deemed fair game. In the current
political climate, heavily populated with polarizing claims crafted
by ideologues masquerading as journalists, the propagation and
dissemination of “post-truth” statements have been exceptionally
successful in disrupting audiences’ rational decision-making pro-
cesses. Veracity, one might speculate, is currently being sacrificed
at the altar of ideology (Roberts 2017). Not only is the president
taking part, he is leading the charge by waging war on the nation’s
media institutions (Gold 2017). With frequent admonitions that
even respectable news organizations like CNN and the New York
Times are peddling “fake news”, President Trump is hard at work
trying to ensure that unquestioned assumptions and personal opin-
ions are elevated to the level of proof by undermining the very
concept of objective knowledge.
3. “Bullshitter-in-chief”
Originally published in Raritan in 1986, Harry Frankfurt’s philo-
sophical treatise On Bullshit is the first sustained academic treat-
ment of the subject. Taking as his point of departure the assertion
that “[o]ne of the most salient features of our culture is that there is
so much bullshit”, offering that “[e]veryone knows this” and that
“[e]ach of us contributes his share” (2005, p. 1), Frankfurt endeav-
ors to not only theorize the conceptual dimensions of bullshit by
probingly defining the term but also seeks to distinguish bullshit
from other forms of dishonesty—lying in particular—by examin-
ing bullshit’s relationship with truth. Rampant in advertising
(Kotzee 2007), endemic in politics (Belfiore 2009), widespread in
academic writing (Cohen 2002), and pervasive in interpersonal
relationships (Olsson 2008), bullshit transcends context and sup-
plants circumstance. Bullshit, Frankfurt contends, is everywhere.
Even so, and quite in spite of its cultural ubiquity, bullshit has
remained largely undefined because it is “often employed quite
loosely—simply as a generic term of abuse, with no very specific
literal meaning” (Frankfurt 2005, p. 2). While Frankfurt’s original
treatise received only marginal attention, the Princeton University
Press’ republication of his essay as a book in 2005 sparked new-
found interest in the concept. A small but productive canon of
work, which we examine below, has since developed in efforts to
clarify and crystallize the concept.
In Frankfurt’s original essay, bullshit is presented as a decep-
tive form of rhetoric whose ultimate goal is distraction or persua-
sion through attempts to “manipulate the opinions and the attitudes
of those” (Frankfurt 2006, p. 4) with whom the bullshitter com-
municates. Although sharing conceptual similarities with lying,
bullshit is nonetheless different from lying because it is, in Frank-
furt’s view, wholly unconcerned with truth. Whereas the liar de-
liberately makes statements designed to mislead by directing
attention away from what the liar believes to be true, thus betray-
ing at least a provisional concern for truth-value on the part of the
liar, the bullshitter holds no special regard for accuracy and is
quite unperturbed by the prospect of misrepresenting reality. For
the bullshitter, the relative truthfulness or falsity of a particular
claim is not only secondary but irrelevant. Therefore, and quite
unlike the liar, who assumes to know what is true but nonetheless
tenders falsity, the bullshitter “cannot be regarded as lying; for she
does not presume that she knows the truth, and therefore she can-
not be deliberately promulgating a proposition that she presumes
to be false” (Frankfurt 2005, p. 33). In order to invent effective lies
and convincingly pass falsehood off as fact, an activity that de-
mands at least provisional “respect for the institution of truth-
telling, albeit a parasitic one” (Aberdein 2006, p. 152), the liar
needs to know not only what is true but must also have a working
understanding of the context into which the false claims are insert-
ed. The bullshitter suffers no such burden. Unrestrained by the
pressures of reality, the bullshitter is even “prepared, so far as
required, to fake the context as well” (Frankfurt 2005, p. 52). It is
this lack of concern for truth, “this indifference to how things
really are” (p. 34), that Frankfurt regards as the central feature of
bullshit.
Of course, just because something might rightfully be de-
scribed as bullshit does not invariably mean that it also is false, for
it is entirely possible to accidentally speak truth. As such, the term
bullshit, at least in Frankfurt’s estimation, is better defined by its
communicative intent than the contents of its expression. What
this means is that the essence of bullshit is not simply “that it is
false[,] but that it is phony” (Frankfurt 2005, p. 47). As Kotzee
explains, it is “not the truth or falsity (or even meaninglessness) of
a sentence that makes it bullshit; it is that it is uttered without
concern for what is true” (2007, p. 168). What the bullshitter seeks
to misrepresent, therefore, is neither reality itself nor the things in
it, but rather his/her intentions. According to Frankfurt, the “bull-
shitter may not deceive us, or even intend to do so, either about the
facts or about what he takes the facts to be. What he does neces-
sarily attempt to deceive us about is his enterprise” (2005, p. 54).
For this reason, the bullshitter’s “only indispensably distinctive
characteristic is that… he misrepresents what he is up to” (2005, p.
54). Ultimately, the bullshitter
is neither on the side of the true nor the side of the false. His eye is
not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and the liar
are, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in get-
ting away with what he says. He does not care whether the things
he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or
makes them up, to suit his purposes. (Frankfurt 2005, p. 56)
Nonetheless, if the bullshitter hopes to be effective in realizing
his/her goals, whatever those goals may be in the given case, it is
crucial—for matters of retaining credibility and generating suffi-
cient persuasive force, either through assertion or by implicature—
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that the bullshitter is also is careful to “conceal the lack of concern
for truth” (Webber 2013, p. 657). If not, the bullshitter might soon
be pegged a liar, an accusation that is far more damaging to the
speaker’s credibility than are accusations that the speaker deals in
bullshit (Frankfurt 2005).
Although Frankfurt concedes that his original project is one of
giving “a rough account of what bullshit is and how it differs from
what it is not—or (putting it somewhat differently) to articulate,
more or less sketchily, the structure of its concept” (p. 2), his work
is not without its critics. Taking issue with Frankfurt’s modernist
assumptions (Reisch 2006; Smagorisnky et al. 2010), his narrow
focus on semantics and truth-value (Olsson 2008; Zavattaro 2017),
as well as his treatment of bullshit as a seemingly monolithic
concept (Carson 2016; Cohen 2002), scholars have sought to
rework and amend his initial theorizations.
The first attempt to do so is offered by Cohen (2002). Arguing
that there are important conceptual differences between intentional
and unintentional bullshit, as well as between bullshitting (an
intransitive verb describing an activity) and bullshit (a noun de-
scribing a thing), Cohen maintains that bullshit as process should
not be confused with bullshit as product, stating that bullshit (the
product) can be generated without also engaging in bullshitting
(the process). In clarifying this difference, Kotzee (2007) offers
that “not all bullshit is bullshit because it was produced with a
bullshitting intention: some of it is bullshit simply by virtue of the
features of the utterance itself, independently of the speaker’s
intention” (p. 169). This type of bullshit, Cohen explains, is en-
demic in academia and is usually expressed in the form of “unclar-
ifiable unclarity” (2002, p. 333). Conceptually inspired by adoxog-
raphy, describing “the inflated vocabulary and obfuscating syntax
employed to veil a poverty of substance in academic essays”
(Smagorinsky et al. 2010, p. 372), “unclarifiable unclarity” defines
language that is so complex, jargonized, imprecise, or confusing
that it is functionally impossible for message recipients to draw
meaningful conclusions or even judge the logical merits of the
arguments presented. What Cohen is critiquing, then, is Frank-
furt’s insistence that bullshit is inherently deceptive and that it
needs to be intentional, claiming instead that it is possible for
honest and ethical people to accidentally produce bullshit without
engaging in the bullshitting process so central to Frankfurt’s ar-
gument (Carson 2016; Kotzee 2007).
Complicating the relationship between bullshit and truth by
offering a pluralist perspective, arguing that truth is not fundamen-
tally an objectively verifiable concept and that legitimate discus-
sions might be had about what is true “about the world, how it
works, [and] about our place in it”, Reisch (2006, p. 37) further
distinguishes between semantic bullshit and pragmatic bullshit.
While semantic bullshit is similar to the bullshit discussed by
Frankfurt (and to some extent Cohen), taking as its subject the
circulation of statements in which the bullshitter shows no appre-
ciable regard for truthfulness or falsity, pragmatic bullshit asks us
to consider “the uses and purposes to which language may be put”
(Reisch 2006, p. 41) and “addresses the goals of the bullshitter in
terms of trying to achieve something potentially legitimate while
fudging the truth” (Smagorinsky et al. 2010, p. 371). More pre-
cisely, pragmatic bullshit springs from a concrete “aim to co-
ordinate two (or more) distinct concerns or conversations and to
use one as a cover or container for the other” (Reisch 2006, p. 42).
Kellyanne Conway’s defense of Sean Spicer, in which she invokes
the term ‘alternative facts’ to defend and bolster the Trump admin-
istration’s credibility, is an apt example of pragmatic bullshit in
the Reischian sense.
While it is true that ‘alternative facts’ is a term used in the le-
gal profession, Conway is attempting to use legal jargon—which
in a news context should appropriately be labelled bullshit—to
deflect accusations that Spicer was lying about the size of Presi-
dent Trump’s inauguration audience. Conway’s hope is that by
using a legal term—even if contextually inappropriate—she might
imbue the semantic container ‘alternative facts’ with undue credi-
bility and persuasive force. Although ethically questionable, this is
a clever strategic move because bullshit is generally treated more
benignly by audiences than is outright lying (e.g., Belfiore 2009;
Webber 2013). Of course, because the size of Trump’s inaugura-
tion audience is not a legal question, for the president is not for-
mally on trial even though he is subject to scrutiny in the court of
public opinion, the invocation of legal terminology—which is
appropriate in a very different context—is a bullshit attempt on
Conway’s part to derail mounting criticism by having claims in
one conversation stand in as evidence in another. In short, lan-
guage that is appropriate in one highly particular context (legal
proceedings) is enlisted as argumentative clout in a new and novel
context (inauguration audience size) in which the term loses its
intended meaning. Conway herself seems indifferent as to whether
this conceptual transfer produces a claim that is true or false. She
only cares about the outcome, namely that people accept the asser-
tion itself.
President Trump’s comments about the size of his inaugura-
tion audience, on the other hand, better fits Frankfurt’s (2005)
definition of bullshit. While Trump is not at all indifferent about
the size of his inauguration crowd, he appears quite indifferent as
to whether his responses to news reports discussing the crowd size
are true or false. That is, Trump is indifferent about the relative
truthfulness of his own claims while simultaneously caring deeply
about the reception of those claims. The president, in other words,
seems concerned about popular perception and the symbolic sig-
nificance of the audience size more so than whether his crowd
was, in actual fact, larger than those of his predecessors. One
might even posit that Trump would not really care to find out what
the numbers actually were as long as he gets to stake his false
claim, that he ultimately cares more about perception than he does
reality, and further speculate that—for President Trump—
perception equals reality. If something is thought to be true in the
minds of audiences, then for them that belief might as well be true.
For this reason, and paraphrasing Frankfurt, Trump is deceiving us
not necessarily about reality itself or the things in it, he is deceiv-
ing us about what he is up to. After all, the size of his inauguration
audience only matters insofar as it is an implicit measure of the
president’s popularity and perceived electoral support. His argu-
ments on this point, therefore, must be considered bullshit because
they merely serve as proxies for an unstated primary goal.
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Pragmatic bullshit, ultimately, is geared towards the realiza-
tion of goals and puts a premium on the production of tangible
effects rather than the establishing of truth (Frankfurt) or the crea-
tion of shared meaning (Cohen). As such, bullshit might even be
construed—given the right circumstances—as something produc-
tive. This argument is pursued by Zavattaro (2017) who argues
that bullshit, once removed from the realm of philosophy, logic,
and rhetoric, and examined from a sociological rather than epis-
temic vantage, is not only a powerful social device but also a
defensible practice. A pragmatic conception of bullshit also allows
us to consider the possibility that not everything a bullshitter says
should be counted as bullshit because bullshit can easily be em-
bedded in a complex web of reasonable assertions and plausible
implicatures as speakers move fluidly from topic to topic and,
possibly, from fact to fiction. After all, it is entirely possible to
pursue legitimate social goals through bullshit while simultaneous-
ly speaking authoritatively about a topic of concern before transi-
tioning back to bullshit because the speaker has been tasked with
discussing a topic about which s/he enjoys limited expertise or
experience. In the end, and quite in spite of additional theorization
and reconceptualizations, no agreed-upon definition of bullshit
exists in the literature. As Reisch explains, “Frankfurt admits that
his definition of bullshit leaves us with a puzzle… some twenty
years later, the puzzle remains unsolved” (2006, p. 33). Carson
speculates that the reason for this is that “the concept of bullshit is
too loose and amorphous to admit of a definition in terms of nec-
essary and sufficient conditions” (2016, p. 66).
Despite diverging accounts regarding definitional matters,
widespread agreement exists vis-à-vis the relative offensiveness of
bullshit. While Frankfurt holds that bullshit is a greater enemy of
truth than is lying, a point widely contested by others (e.g.,
Sakama et al. 2014; Webber 2013), he also explains that “people
tend to be more tolerant of bullshit than of lies, perhaps because
we are less inclined to take the former as a personal affront”
(2005, p. 50). The conception that bullshit is less insidious than
lying is also shared by Belfiore, who offers that “society seems to
be prepared to treat the bullshitter with more leniency than it does
the liar” (2009, p. 344), and Webber who argues that lying “dam-
ages both credibility in assertion and credibility in implicature,”
whereas misleading (of which bullshit is part) “damages only
credibility in implicature” (2013, p. 651). Sakama et al., in subject-
ing various forms of dishonesty to the rules of multi-modal logic,
and as such laying out their conceptual properties by employing an
analytical “framework based on formal logic” (2014, p. 290),
arrange common deceptive tactics on a credibility continuum
ranging from “untrusted” to “trusted” (p. 283). At the far end, and
thus most detrimental to a speaker’s credibility, is lying. Following
lying, and presented in a descending order of detriment, is bullshit-
ting, withholding of information, and the telling of half-truths (p.
283). Reaching the same conclusion, and echoing Frankfurt’s
advice to “never lie when you can bullshit your way through”
(Frankfurt 2005, p. 48), Webber offers that “we have good reason
to respond with greater opprobrium to lies than to bullshit” (2013,
p. 658). Even so, honesty is generally “the best policy. But if you
must depart from it, then you should mislead first, bullshit second
and lie only as a last resort” (Webber 2013, p. 659).
Although the accounts reviewed above all provide valuable
insights, few of them offer actual examples of real-world bullshit.
In the available literature, bullshit is generally treated as a thought
exercise and most of the existing accounts are rooted in hypothet-
ical, historical, and/or literary examples. Aside from Smagorinsky
et al.’s study of bullshit in student writing, Belfiore’s study on
bullshit in British cultural policy, and a small collection of writ-
ings in the book edited by Hardcastle and Reisch (2006), applica-
tion essays are almost non-existent. This current study seeks to
amend this problem. If bullshit is indeed as prevalent and wide-
spread as Frankfurt and his critics suggest, more work should be
conducted in order to point out actual uses and abuses of bullshit.
Given the power afforded to U.S. presidents by virtue of the office
they occupy, presidential bullshit seems an apt point of departure.
So, what then, is bullshit? Rather than seeking to clarify un-
clarities, to arrive at statements that might be deemed true, even if
only provisionally, bullshit seeks to obscure, mislead, and obfus-
cate—to render difficult to determine those things that might
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actually be rather straightforward. It is generally accompanied by a
bullshitting intention, but can also be produced inadvertently.
Moreover, bullshit is both a product and a process and is common-
ly called into existence when people are asked to speak on matters
about which they have little or no expertise or experience (Frank-
furt 2005). Enlisted in support of unstated primary goals, bullshit
can also be evasive when used strategically to distract audiences
from a speaker’s actual motives. As such, and as regards the rhe-
torical style of President Trump, we are not suggesting that every-
thing the president says should be counted as bullshit, for he also
lies, tells the truth, and frames situations to suit his purposes. We
are, however, suggesting that his penchant for bullshit muddies the
proverbial waters to the point where it is often difficult to deter-
mine what is true and what is not. In short, Trump frequently
peddles bullshit in the Frankfurtian, Cohenian, as well as Reischi-
an senses of the term.
4. The emerging bullshit doctrine
As of November 14, 2017, President Trump had publicly made
1,628 false or misleading claims, an average of 5.5 per day during
his presidency (Kessler, Kelly and Lewis 2017). False and mis-
leading claims promulgated by the president usually include praise
for himself and his policies or they seek to demean or discredit his
detractors. Given Trump’s history of self-promotion, and his
propensity for ridiculing opponents, this is not surprising. None-
theless, Trump’s approach to bullshit sets him apart from the
average politician, for he moves so fluidly between fabrication,
fantasy, and deception that standard mechanisms for dealing with
falsehoods no longer apply. As George Will explains, Trump’s
rhetorical style is “not merely the result of intellectual sloth but of
an untrained mind bereft of information and married to strato-
spheric self-confidence” (2017, para 1). Surprisingly, rather than
suffering lasting negative consequences, Trump often emerges
unscathed even after his spurious claims are debunked. He is even
wont to double down on discredited nonsense. As such, Trump
takes us into uncharted bullshit territory, not least because of the
power afforded by the office he occupies.
An apt example is Trump’s kneejerk reactions to Michael
Flynn’s confession that he lied to FBI agents about his conversa-
tions with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak during the presi-
dential transition period. This episode represents a sequence of
apparent lies that concluded with a series of bullshit statements. In
a tweet, the president claimed he “had to fire General Flynn be-
cause he lied to the Vice President and the FBI” (Carter 2017,
para. 5). It is unclear why Trump would tweet such a statement. If
true, he might have incriminated himself by admitting to obstruc-
tion of justice. In June, 2017, James Comey testified in congress
that Trump had asked him to end the investigation of Flynn and
that the president had demanded a pledge of loyalty.1 When the
ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, Senator
Feinstein (D-Calif.), stated she believed that an obstruction of
justice case against the president was forming as part of the ongo-
ing Senate investigation (Meet the Press with Chuck Todd 2017),
Trump tweeted “I never asked Comey to stop investigating Flynn.
Just more Fake News covering another Comey lie!” (Trump
2017c). While it is difficult to (dis)prove that the former FBI
director lied under oath, it seems unlikely that he would do so.
Moreover, Trump stated in an NBC interview in May of 2017 that
he fired Comey because of the FBI investigation into Russian
election meddling (Holt 2017). Most likely, Trump lied to cover
up his reckless and self-incriminating tweet.
Following these attempts at exoneration, Trump crafted a se-
ries of bullshit statements aimed at discrediting the entire investi-
gation in which he claimed—contrary to his own FBI director—
that the reputation of the FBI was in “tatters— worst in History!”
(Trump 2017d). He also claimed that Hillary Clinton had lied to
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the FBI despite the agency never stating that she made false state-
ments: “Hillary Clinton on 4 July weekend went to the FBI, not
under oath—it was the most incredible thing anyone has ever
seen—lied many times, nothing happened to her. Flynn lied, and
it’s like—it ruined his life. It’s very unfair” (Smith & Pengelly
2017, para. 4). A U.S. president openly showing contempt for two
federal agencies, the FBI and the Department of Justice, by fabri-
cating falsehoods to protect himself is unprecedented. That lying is
a strategy used by politicians is not new, it is a part of statecraft
(Kaussler and Hastedt 2017). For populists like Trump lying is an
effective tool by which to rally supporters by playing on tribalism,
thereby reinforcing biases already shared among members of the
electorate. However, unlike shrewd statesmen before him,
Trump’s impetuous and off-the-cuff fabrications do not fit the
established mold. Even Richard Nixon pretended in public to be
subject to the rule of law—even though he broke and considered
himself above it. Trump’s nepotism and admiration for strong man
politics is closer to authoritarian structures than it is to a liberal
democracy. This aspect of the Trump presidency brings us the
closest to Frankfurt’s original definition of bullshit. Since Trump
does not appear to be guided by the rule of law, but seems instead
to have embraced an authoritarian interpretation of “power-based
law” over “rule-based law”, his bullshit ultimately serves to realize
political goals rather than establishing truth. More than just cover-
ing up illicit dealings or occasionally lying to grease the wheels of
a sluggish political machine, bullshit is the modus operandi of the
Trump administration. When promulgated with impunity by a
sitting president, such bullshit constitutes a real threat to democrat-
ic norms and institutions.
Trump’s emerging bullshit doctrine is both personal and polit-
ical in nature. The first category of bullshit derives not only from
the president’s abovementioned contempt for the rule of law, but
also from a lack of basic competence and interest in the U.S. polit-
ical system, its governance, and international affairs. Indeed, many
of Trump’s statements—delivered via Twitter or during speeches
and interviews—must be considered bullshit because not only are
they uninformed and untrue, they merely serve populist purposes.
That is, they are aimed at insulting, discrediting, and smearing
critics while simultaneously inflating or fabricating the president’s
accomplishments in order to make him look competent. This type
of bullshit is primarily rooted in Cohenian obfuscation, but also
has direct pragmatic manifestations in the Reischian sense. In the
realm of foreign policy, Trump’s bullshit is largely Cohenian and
appears the inevitable result of a political novice tasked with
speaking on topics about which he enjoys only limited expertise,
experience, or interest.
Bullshit falling into the second category brings us closer to
Frankfurt and Reisch in that the immediate political goal is to
undermine ongoing investigations of the Trump campaign and
further to contradict the collective assessment of his own intelli-
gence appointees about the nature and scope of the Russian threat
to American democracy. For example, following yet another
school shooting, this time in Parkland, FL, the president took to
Twitter in an attempt to further his political goals by recasting the
tragic event as evidence that the FBI is incompetent, unreliable,
and untrustworthy: “Very sad that the FBI missed all of the many
signals sent out by the Florida school shooter. This is not accepta-
ble. They are spending too much time trying to prove Russian
collusion with the Trump campaign—there is no collusion” (Held
2018, para. 4). In much the same way that Kellyanne Conway used
legal terminology to defend Sean Spicer’s false claim that Trump’s
inauguration was the most highly attended inauguration in history,
Trump is implying that because the FBI failed to apprehend the
shooter prior to committing the crime, they are also incapable of
providing credible evidence in other situations. The implied logic,
which follows the bullshit pattern outlined by Reisch (2006),
stipulates that if the FBI cannot outwit and apprehend a teenager,
then how can the bureau possibly offer credible testimony in a
much more complicated case? By connecting two stories that are
inherently unrelated, and using one as argumentative clout in the
other, Trump is seeking to diminish the FBI’s credibility by engag-
ing in pragmatic bullshit. If Trump can successfully discredit the
FBI, then whatever they might find as part of their investigation
will ultimately be of limited import. That, at least, seems to be the
president’s reasoning.
Because Trump’s radical populism is tied to white-identity
politics, and displays a weakness for authoritarianism, his dema-
gogic rhetoric remains underwritten by apparent absurdity as well
as bullshit and often masquerades as either policy proposals or
historical references. In a tweet following the terrorist attacks in
Barcelona, Trump praised a previously discredited story claiming
that General Pershing ordered the execution of Muslim insurgents
with bullets soaked in pigs’ blood during the U.S. war in the Phil-
ippines in the early 1900s. The tweet called for people to “Study
what General Pershing of the United States did to terrorists when
caught. There was no more Radical Islamic Terror for 35 years!”
(Fabian 2017, para. 2). After his ouster, former Trump campaign
manager Corey Lewandowski said that his team knew that the
story was a myth but let Trump tell it at rallies anyway, telling the
Washington Post in 2016 that “[i]t’s not about that. Look it’s an
analogy” (Fabian 2017, para. 5). When the president retweeted
inflammatory and unverified anti-Muslim videos from a British
right-wing extremist group in November 2017, Prime Minister
Theresa May said that Trump was “wrong” to disseminate material
from a group that promotes “hateful narratives” (Parker and Wag-
ner 2017, para. 7). However, the White House Press Secretary’s
(Sarah Huckabee Sanders) defense of Trump’s redistribution of
unverified Islamophobic videos argued that it did not matter
whether the videos were fake or not, emphasizing instead the
context of national security threats. Sanders stated: “whether it is a
real video, the threat is real and that is what the President is talking
about, that is what the President is focused on is dealing with those
real threats, and those are real no matter how you look at it”
(Channel 4 News 2017). While Trump’s bullshit aimed at domes-
tic audiences might be the result of deliberate plans or intellectual
sloth, or a combination of the two, his ignorance and lack of inter-
est concerning the intricacies of foreign policy makes his bullshit
aimed at foreign audiences almost entirely Cohenian. Not only
does Trump forego reading the President’s Daily Brief, he is easily
manipulated by foreign leaders (letting them explain U.S. posi-
ions to him), and also fails to fully grasp the nature of collective
security (Graham 2017). Unwilling to make the requisite effort,
and as such speaking without the necessary evidentiary backing,
Trump is habitually poised to bullshit out of sheer necessity.
When confronted about the lies perpetuated by Trump during
his time in the White House, Kellyanne Conway told CNN’s Brian
Stelter that they did not constitute lies because Trump believed
them:
Stelter: The scandals are about the President’s lies. About voter
fraud, about wiretapping, his repeated lies about those issues.
That’s the scandal.
Conway: [Donald Trump] doesn’t think he’s lying about those is-
sues, and you know it. (Cillizza 2017, para. 2-3)
The Guardian’s Lindy West even argues that Trump has weapon-
ized nonsense, stating that:
Without language, there is no accountability, no standard of truth.
If Trump never says anything concrete, he never has to do any-
thing concrete. If Trump never makes a statement of commitment,
Trump supporters never have to confront what they really voted
for. If his promises are vague to the point of opacity, Trump can-
not be criticized for breaking them. (2017, para. 8)
As the White House began defending the president’s contro-
versial statements as “jokes” (e.g. when he thanked President Putin
on Twitter for expelling U.S. diplomats from the U.S. Embassy in
August or his endorsement of police brutality before a crowd of
police officers on Long Island in July 2017), West Wing staff
effectively enabled the president to bullshit with impunity.
So much as these fabrications may be the result of alleged
jokes, intellectual deficiencies, lack of competence, knowledge, or
training, Kellyanne Conway’s proposed defense that Trump be-
lieved in his fabrication seem particularly pronounced in one
watershed bullshit statement: the claim that President Obama
bugged Trump Tower during the election. This claim became a
cornerstone of a subsequent misinformation campaign by the
president in an effort to undermine and discredit congressional and
FBI investigations into alleged collusion. On March 4th, 2017,
President Trump tweeted “Terrible! Just found out that Obama had
my ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower just before the victory. Noth-
ing found. This is McCarthyism!” (Trump 2017a). He continued in
another tweet: “How low has President Obama gone to tapp [sic]
my phones during the very sacred election process. This is Nix-
on/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy!” (Trump 2017b). Trump’s accu-
sations lacked any proof and were immediately denied by Presi-
dent Obama’s spokesperson, by former FBI Director James
Comey, as well as former Director of National Intelligence, James
Clapper. Clapper told NBC’s Meet the Press with Chuck Todd that
there was no “Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) re-
quest to wiretap President Donald Trump during the election”
(Schmid and Shear 2017, para 20). The next day, Sean Spicer said
during the White House press briefing that “neither the White
House nor the president will comment any further” and proceeded
to put the burden of proof on the congressional intelligence com-
mittees to exercise their oversight to determine whether Obama
abused executive powers (Politifact 2017, para. 9). The White
House spokesperson, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, then falsely
claimed that “[e]verybody acts like President Trump is the one that
came up with this idea… There are multiple news outlets that have
reported former President Barack Obama ordered wiretapping on
Trump” (Politifact 2017, para 13).
The White House would continue with damage control as
Sean Spicer suggested on March 13th that Trump did not mean that
Obama literally wiretapped him: “If you look at the president’s
tweet, he said very clearly quote—‘wiretapping’—end quote”,
thus suggesting that the president did not necessarily mean there
was a physical tap on his phones (Politifact 2017, para. 18). While
Trump himself tried to justify his allegations during an interview
on Fox News and falsely referenced a January 20th, 2017, article
from The New York Times in which, according to Trump, they
“were talking about wiretapping”, the allegation was eventually
denied during a House Intelligence Committee meeting. Both
James Comey and NSA Director, Mike Rogers, stated that there
was no information from intelligence agencies or the Department
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of Justice supporting those tweets (Politifact 2017, para. 21).
Trump’s fabrication about President Obama having ordered sur-
veillance of Trump Tower phone lines was primarily bullshit but it
was still meant to undermine the credibility of the FBI. His subse-
quent accusations that the investigation was the greatest witch hunt
in American history continued this fabrication. When pressed
about his accusations against President Obama during a CBS
interview in the Oval Office in May 2017, he insisted that he was
proven right because everyone was still talking about the matter
while recasting his allegations as a matter of his own personal
opinion:
Dickerson: Did President Obama give you any advice that was
helpful? That you think, wow, he really was—
Trump: —Well, he was very nice to me. But after that, we’ve
had some difficulties. So it doesn’t matter. You know, words are
less important to me than deeds. And you—you saw what hap-
pened with surveillance. And everybody saw what happened
with surveillance—
Dickerson: Difficulties how?
Trump: —and I thought that—well, you saw what happened with
surveillance. And I think that was inappropriate, but that’s the
way—
Dickerson: What does that mean, sir?
Trump: You can figure that out yourself.
Dickerson: Well, I— the reason I ask is you said he was— you
called him “sick and bad.”
Trump: Look, you can figure it out yourself. He was very nice to
me with words, but-— and when I was with him—but after that,
there has been no relationship.
Dickerson: But you stand by that claim about him?
Trump: I don’t stand by anything. I just— you can take it the
way you want. I think our side’s been proven very strongly. And
everybody’s talking about it. And frankly it should be discussed.
I think that is a very big surveillance of our citizens. I think it’s
a very big topic. And it’s a topic that should be number one.
And we should find out what the hell is going on.
Dickerson: I just wanted to find out, though. You’re—you’re the
president of the United States. You said he was “sick and bad”
because he had tapped you—I’m just—
Trump: You can take— any way. You can take it any way you
want.
Dickerson: But I'm asking you. Because you don’t want it to be—
Trump: You don’t—
Dickerson: —fake news. I want to hear it from—
Trump: You don’t have to—
Dickerson: —President Trump.
Trump: —ask me. You don’t have to ask me.
Dickerson: Why not?
Trump: Because I have my own opinions. You can have your
own opinions.
Dickerson: But I want to know your opinions. You’re the presi-
dent of the United States.
Trump: Okay, it’s enough. Thank you. Thank you very much.
(Dickerson 2017, para. 66-87)
After the non-partisan group American Oversight filed a
Freedom of Information Request to the FBI and the DoJ to
obtain documents related to the purported wiretapping, both
agencies wrote in a summary judgment court filing on Septem-
ber 1, 2017, that “they do not have any such records by con-
sulting with personnel knowledgeable about Director Comey’s
statements and the surveillance activities of the FBI” (Abram-
son 2017, para. 2). The charges against former campaign man-
ager, Paul Manafort, brought by the Special Counsel also did
not support Trump’s allegations against Obama. There is no
evidence that President Obama committed a crime by ordering
surveillance of the Trump campaign in 2016 and the legal
surveillance of Manafort by the FBI occurred after the cam-
paign and was solely targeted at Manafort.
Domestically, this episode—when coupled with Trump’s
history of frivolously attacking federal agencies, U.S. media
institutions, members of the opposition, and even ordinary
members of the public—represents a fundamental erosion of
democratic norms in a liberal democracy. A democratic polity,
after all, requires truth to function. When power and truth
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become completely unhinged at the highest level, democratic
norms are deliberately being undermined. One year into his
presidency, Trump has no stable grammar for truth. Indeed,
after entering the political arena as a self-avowed Washington
“outsider”, he has instead displayed contempt for the rule of
law and democratic governance and it appears that the presi-
dent perceives himself as subject to a different set of rules or
perhaps no rules at all. Being called on his bullshit seems to
have limited impact as fact-finding ventures by the press are
routinely discarded as “fake news”.
While populism mixed with bullshit may have a long-term
impact on democratic norms, nonsense in diplomacy bears
more immediately tangible effects. Domestically, loyalists on
either side of the political spectrum may be willing to suspend
critical reflection on truth. The international arena, however, is
less forgiving. Here bullshit is more likely to attract rejection
and hostile reactions by allies and antagonists alike.
The Trump administration’s foreign policy during its first
eight months in office was marked as much by severe infighting
inside the White House, and across the entire executive branch, as
it was by a struggle over ideology, substance, and direction. After
eight months, key members of the administration, including the
Chief of Staff, Reince Priebus, National Security Adviser, Michael
Flynn, Press Secretary, Sean Spicer, and Chief Strategist, Steve
Bannon, either resigned or were sacked. Generally, as far as di-
plomacy is concerned, the first year represents a learning curve for
any new president, particularly foreign policy neophytes like
George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama. While Trump
is unique in that he lacks previous governmental experience, he
has also shown little interest in acquiring substantive input in order
to make up the difference. From the outset, he resisted national
security briefs during the transition and often talked about what he
learned from foreign heads of state (e.g., from China about North
Korea). An ardent viewer of Fox & Friends, Trump used the
show’s opinions and often inaccurate accounts for his own politi-
cal arguments or tweets (Mackey 2017). He shared code-word
level intelligence with the Russian foreign minister and ambassa
dor during their visit to the White House and confirmed a covert
CIA program to arm and train Syrian rebels to remove Bashar al-
Assad from power in a tweet (Ward 2017). Ultimately, foreign
policy during this period was informed by the president’s reck-
lessness, impulsiveness, and ignorance, but particularly by bull-
shit. While tensions between first-time National Security Council
staff and other political appointees in the West Wing and perma-
nent bureaucrats across federal agencies are common for any
administration, foreign policy was often contradicted or under-
mined by the president himself. In international relations, main-
taining the status quo and reducing uncertainty about intentions is
one of the most important elements of international stability. As
the new administration was withdrawing from international
agreements like the Paris Accord, leaving NATO members won-
dering about the U.S.’s commitment to the alliance, the U.S. Am-
bassador to the UN, Nikki Haley, claimed that it served as negotia-
tion leverage with foreign countries. At the House Foreign Affairs
Committee, she reflected:
I deal with 192 [countries], and the overwhelming feeling is that
we are unpredictable; they don’t know exactly what we are going
to do… It has kept them more on alert, of wanting to be there with
us, not wanting to get on the wrong side of us. (Lynch, C 2017,
para. 3)
Credibility is sacrosanct in international relations and Trump lacks
it. Far from creating leverage, the president keeps undermining the
efforts put forth by members of his own cabinet and has even
managed to cast doubt on U.S. commitment to the jointly-U.S.-
brokered multilateral Iran Nuclear Deal. As a result, allies are less
likely to trust U.S. promises and U.S. threats will lose their force-
fulness (Yarhi-Milo 2018, p. 68). Below we examine three stand-
out cases illustrating how unpredictability about what constitutes
policy and what constitutes bullshit by the U.S. president has
affected the U.S. government’s foreign affairs.
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Because of Trump’s statements as a candidate (and initially as
president) on U.S. commitment to NATO, the relationship be-
tween the new administration and foreign allies was marked by
uncertainty. Trump insisted that NATO was obsolete and contin-
ued to rebuke NATO allies for not meeting their financial contri-
butions to the alliance. Such rhetoric left allies wondering whether
the U.S. would meet its collective security obligations. In fact,
President Trump chided NATO leaders during the Brussels sum-
mit on May 25th, 2017, proclaiming that “[t]wenty-three of the 28
member nations are still not paying what they should be paying
and what they are supposed to be paying for their defense. This is
not fair to the people and taxpayers of the United States” (Baker
2017a, para. 17). The speech that was drafted by the president’s
national security team contained a reaffirmation of the U.S. com-
mitment to Article 5, the treaty’s collective security clause. Ac-
cording to U.S. National Security officials, the speech, which had
been cleared by National Security Adviser, H.R. McMaster, had
been altered by Trump himself without consulting or even inform-
ing National Security Council (NSC) staff in advance. Like NATO
leaders, NSC staff realized the line had been removed upon deliv-
ery of the speech (Glasser 2017). During the closed-door dinner,
officials were further chastised by Trump and threatened that the
U.S. would cut “back U.S. defense spending and have Europeans
dole out ‘back pay’ to make up for their low defense spending if
they didn’t pony up quickly enough” (Gramer 2017, para. 6). The
issue of Russia, recognized by NATO members, including the U.S.
military and intelligence community, as the foremost conventional
security threat to the West, was not brought up by Trump during
the dinner (Gramer 2017).
In another extraordinary move, Trump tweeted during the
NATO summit that “[e]veryone here is talking about why John
Podesta refused to give the DNC server to the FBI and the CIA.
Disgraceful!” (Lejeune 2017, para. 1). John Podesta was the cam-
paign chairman for Hillary Clinton and had nothing to do with the
DNC’s handling of the data breach by Russian hackers. Combined
with Trump’s continued denial of the U.S. intelligence communi-
ty’s conclusion that Russia did interfere in the elections, even
members of Congress questioned the president’s position on trans-
Atlantic security. The top Democrat on the House Intelligence
Committee, Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) called on Trump to confront
Russia over its “continued destabilization of the Ukraine” and
stated that “[t]his is not putting America first, but continuing to
propagate his own personal fiction at the country’s expense” (Sav-
ransky 2017, para. 3-4). Trump only endorsed the collective de-
fense clause when asked by a reporter during the Romanian presi-
dent’s visit at the White House two weeks after the summit (Baker
2017b). Trump’s benign attitudes towards Russia are a stark de-
parture from U.S. commitment to European security and while his
insistence on European “back pay” may be informed by his na-
tionalist platform, much of the president’s position on NATO
seems derived from his own ignorance. In his interview with the
Associated Press, he admitted that he did not know much about
NATO, so he concluded that it was obsolete:
They had a quote from me that NATO’s obsolete. But they didn’t
say why it was obsolete. I was on Wolf Blitzer, very fair inter-
view, the first time I was ever asked about NATO, because I
wasn’t in government. People don’t go around asking about
NATO if I’m building a building in Manhattan, right? So they
asked me, Wolf ... asked me about NATO, and I said two things.
NATO’s obsolete—not knowing much about NATO, now I know
a lot about NATO—NATO is obsolete, and I said, ‘And the rea-
son it’s obsolete is because of the fact they don’t focus on terror-
ism’. You know, back when they did NATO there was no such
thing as terrorism. (Associated Press 2017, para. 98)
This episode is Cohenian in nature: caused by ignorance and ap-
parent apathy about a core U.S. foreign policy commitment and
undeterred by a historic bipartisan consensus on this issue, the
president bullshitted.2 U.S. assurances on NATO’s collective
security arrangement is vital not just for the deterrence value of the
organization, but ultimately for U.S. trustworthiness vis-à-vis its
allies and adversaries.
4.2 The Qatar crisis
Shortly following President Trump’s visit to the Middle East on
June 5, 2017, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Egypt, and the UAE cut
diplomatic relations with Qatar and imposed an economic embar-
go due to its alleged support for terrorism. The effort to isolate
Qatar over its relations with Iran and its generally independent
foreign policy must be seen as part of Saudi Arabia’s determina-
tion to balance against its regional peer competitor, Iran. Demands
for the Qatari government included cutting diplomatic relations
with Iran, ceasing relations with groups considered terrorist organ-
izations, such as the Muslim Brotherhood, and closure of the Al-
Jazeera news network. As Secretary of State Tillerson tried, and
ultimately failed, to engage in shuttle diplomacy between the Gulf
States and Qatar, the host country of U.S. Central Command,
President Trump’s statement on Qatar reflected Saudi rather than
U.S. interests:
The nation of Qatar, unfortunately, has historically been a funder
of terrorism at a very high level, and in the wake of that confer-
ence, nations came together and spoke to me about confronting
Qatar over its behavior. So we had a decision to make: Do we
take the easy road, or do we finally take a hard but necessary ac-
tion? We have to stop the funding of terrorism. I decided, along
with Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, our great generals and
military people, the time had come to call on Qatar to end its
funding—they have to end that funding—and its extremist ide-
ology in terms of funding. (White House 2017, para. 5)
After the president suggested that the U.S. could move Cen-
tral Command and continued with very pro-Saudi and UAE state-
ments, the Pentagon had to intervene and reiterate that they had no
intention of moving the U.S. military base (Lynch, M 2017). As
Trump was lashing out against Qatar, the Pentagon was hosting
the Qatari Defense Minister who signed a letter of offer and ac-
ceptance for the purchase of F-15 QA fighter jets, estimated at $12
billion (Brennan and Atwood 2017). Prior to that, Secretary of
State Rex Tillerson had travelled to Doha and signed a Memoran-
dum of Understanding (MOA) with the Qatari government in
which the government pledged “to interrupt, disable terror financ-
ing flows and intensify counter-terrorism activities globally”
(Gaouette and Cohen 2017, para. 7). Negotiations for the bilateral
counter-terrorism agreement had already been under way for over
a year.
Contrary to efforts and policy pursued by the Pentagon and
State Department, the president undercut his own administration
throughout the crisis by publicly siding with Saudi Arabia’s posi-
tion. This was an extraordinary incident in U.S. foreign policy. We
are not witnessing what has happened throughout U.S. diplomatic
history, which relates to executive infighting or bureaucratic dis-
sent (e.g. when Secretary of State Cyrus Vance resigned in protest
at President Carter’s decision to use military force to bring back
the U.S. hostages from Tehran in 1980). What happened during
the Qatar crisis was that both the Department of State and the
Department of Defense simply ignored statements issued by the
president and instead carried out the exact opposite policy, for they
realized that Trump—in the absence of the requisite substantive
knowledge—offered nothing but off-the-cuff Cohenian bullshit.
4.3 The madman strategy and North Korea
The crisis that ensued between the U.S. and North Korea in Au-
gust of 2017 was exacerbated by Trump’s bullshit. U.S. and multi-
lateral efforts at North Korean non-nuclear proliferation proved
futile when North Korea tested a hydrogen bomb in 2016 and
continued to make progress on its intercontinental ballistic missile
(ICBM) system. The Trump administration’s first major crisis
with North Korea came after the regime successfully tested an
ICBM and claimed that it could reach “anywhere in the world”
(McKirdy 2017).
On August 7, Pyongyang accused the U.S. government of
“trying to drive the situation of the Korean peninsula to the brink
of nuclear war” after the UN Security Council unanimously adopt-
ed new sanctions in response to the ICBM tests (CNN 2017). Two
days later, at his golf course in New Jersey, President Trump told
reporters that “North Korea best not make any more threats to the
United States… They will be met with fire and fury like the world
has never seen” (Baker and Sang-Hun 2017, para. 1). White House
staff and Trump’s own cabinet members were caught off guard by
what was described as improvised language by the president.
Secretary Tillerson told reporters that “Americans should sleep
well at night”, reassuring the nation that nothing indicated that
relations with the regime had “dramatically changed in the last 24
hours” (Trush and Baker 2017, para. 23).
It was after this threat that the North Korean regime threat-
ened to strike the U.S. territory of Guam with medium-to-long-
range strategic ballistic missiles. Throughout the crisis, the U.S.
defense readiness alert system DEFCON remained at level 4
(normal, increased intelligence and strengthened security
measures). DEFCON 5 is normal peacetime readiness and DEF-
CON 1 is maximum force readiness. In fact, in this case, Trump’s
penchant for impulsiveness and fabrication over engaging in a
deliberate decision-making process to implement coherent strate-
gies and policies even during a nuclear standoff does not meet the
criteria of the “Madman Theory”. Thomas Schelling’s (2008)
work on nuclear brinkmanship centers on the idea that it is best to
be believed to be a little crazy. Threats are more credible if it
appears leaders are not concerned that much about their own sur-
vival. Here, the “Madman Theory” asks for leaders to show im-
petuosity, irrationality, and automaticity (reprisals set to launch
automatically) (Schelling 2008, pp. 92-126).
During nuclear brinkmanship, hostile leaders engage in a se-
ries of threats, exerting pressure on one another and ultimately
sharing the risks that it may result in nuclear exchange. As a result,
during this game of chicken, warring leaders only increase the
risks gradually, giving themselves room for retreat and de-
escalation. It would be wrong, however, to credit Trump for effec-
tively engaging in brinkmanship because it was his volatile rheto-
ric that exacerbated the crisis in the first place. After all, when
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news about the Neo-Nazi attacks in Charlottesville broke, Trump
was distracted and his tweets and statements about North Korea
immediately ceased (Beauchamp 2017). The threat of a nuclear
strike was not a product of a strategic consensus by key foreign
policy and military decision makers, but rather extemporaneous
bullshit based on impulsiveness. Nuclear brinkmanship based on
bullshit rather than reason is inherently dangerous, for nuclear
deterrence may be underwritten by fear of your enemy’s hostility
but it is still tied to a government’s credibility to execute threats.
Not only did the president not seem to care whether his threats
described reality—U.S. defense posture at the time—correctly, he
was also overridden by members of his own cabinet. He continued
to undermine Tillerson’s efforts to re-open dialogue with the
regime in October, tweeting that the Secretary of State “was wast-
ing his time”, saying “save your energy Rex”. Not unlike the
NATO episode, Cohenian bullshit not only undermined U.S.
credibility but also its signaling reputation (a state’s record of
carrying out threats or fulfilling promises), a key component for
credible nuclear deterrence (Yarhi-Milo 2018, p.75). Trump con-
tinues to taunt the North Korean dictator on Twitter by comparing
the size of nuclear buttons and vows to have the power to annihi-
late the country. In January 2018, Hawaii’s Emergency Manage-
ment Agency sent an emergency alert notification, because an
employee had pushed the wrong button, that a ballistic missile was
inbound. Nuclear war caused by human error or human bullshit
remains a distinct possibility.
5. Conclusion
Trump’s endgame is celebrity. He places no particular value on the
meaning of words, for they are merely tools for a different purpose
altogether. What is said one day can be discarded the next. Policy
or strategy can be altered at an instant or discredited at the expense
of cabinet members, the military, the intelligence community, or
even his political allies in congress. A devout parishioner in the
cult of celebrity, Trump will say what needs to be said, or do what
needs to be done, in order to draw the irresistible gaze of the ce
lebrity machine, to be invited—with open arms or reluctant hesita-
tion—into the homes of people around the globe through their
TVs, their radios, or even better, their multi-platform technological
devices. For Trump, being the topic of discussion is much more
important than substantively contributing to the discussion itself.
Lies, deception, and bullshit are integral parts of Trump’s populist
toolbox and he is not hesitant about their use. Even so, bullshit
aimed at a domestic audience is very different than bullshit aimed
at foreign ones. Historically, when populism has entered into
foreign policy, the international community has always rallied
against the country threatening the status quo.
It seems, however, that Trump is also facing increasing oppo-
sition at home and that his allies’ tolerance for bullshit is decreas-
ing. Congressional detractors in his own party, like Senator Jeff
Flake (R-Ariz.) have started to publicly cast Trump’s conspiracies
and falsehoods as threats to democracy: “It’s dangerous to democ-
racy; you’ve got to have shared facts,” […] “And on so many of
these, there’s empirical evidence that says no: You didn’t win the
popular vote, there weren’t more people at your inauguration than
ever, that was your voice on that tape, you admitted it before”
(Haberman and Martin 2017, para.12 ). Pressed about the presi-
dent’s values following the deadly violence in Charlottesville, VA,
and whether those values are shared among members of the ad-
ministration, Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, unceremoniously
told FOX’s Chris Wallace that “the president speaks for himself,
Chris” (The Editorial Board 2017, para. 3)
