Entrapment through lies
The number of lies Trump has been spreading keeps all fact-checkers busy. In fact, it is a bit redundant to disprove Trump’s lies as confirming facts might be easier, as it happens a lot less frequently. Lies, of course, function to improve his perception of himself (remember the size of the inauguration crowd in 2017?). However, there is a bigger purpose to the lies. Anna Applebaum, in her book Twilight of Democracy, talks about the medium-size lie. Rather than the big lie of totalitarian ideologies, the new autocrats don’t ask people to buy into a huge conformist lie, but medium-size lies that spread conspiracies and enable people to enter the rabbit hole of the world of these autocratic leaders. She evoked the birther conspiracy of Trump that claimed that Obama was not born in the US, the conspiracy surrounding the plane crash of Smolensk in 2010 when the Polish President Lech Kaczyński died.
However, the lies, big and small, serve another purpose: They entrap followers. The most prominent foundational lie of Trump is the claim that he lost the election in 2020 due to voter fraud and manipulation. While he, his lawyers and his followers were unable to produce any evidence and most Republicans appear to have been skeptical at the time, it has become an article of faith for his followers, and most Republicans endorsed the narrative even if it was clearly a lie. Of course, such a lie is self-serving, but it also ties the followers to the leader. Joining the lie is a one-way street. Whether out of conviction or opportunism, endorsing this lie means one joins the Trump camp. Lies close the door to changing one’s own view, as it first requires rejecting the lie. This is hard personally and even more difficult if one has a public presence. The lie thus creates a bond that is hard to escape, just like sects do when they create a parallel reality that is hard to challenge for a number of reasons (i.e., sunk cost fallacy). We find such constitutive lies at the core of sects or nation-building projects (such as genocide denial in Turkey or Serbia), and making those challenging these foundational lies outcasts.
The Trump presidency is built around several such lies, which create a system of dependence. Political opportunities have to repudiate the lies they pragmatically adopted, and true believers have to tell themselves that they believed a lie. These are hard steps that explain the power and centrality of lies. While Trump’s lies may be medium-sized in comparison to the big lies of Fascism, they serve the same function of entrapment.