The kids weren't really traveling with their parents, he said; the Democrats are just as bad; we're trying to reunite them, etc. But then, after Biden had delivered his reply, Trump seemed to remember the crowning bleat of dishonesty that he had meant to deliver from the start: "They did it!" said Trump—meaning the Democrats; "We changed the policy. They did it. We changed."
Hear that, folks? Trump never actually separated families at all. Democrats did it, and then Trump heroically stopped it. Don't you remember? Maybe you don't? Maybe you actually can't see how that response is compatible in any way with Trump's first five responses to the question, all of which accepted the basic premise that he had in fact inflicted the "zero tolerance" policy, as the public record reflects?
It is in moments like these that Trump puts forth his innovation on the political lie. The classic form of the genre is of course the straight-up denial: I did not have sexual relations with that woman, e.g. But Trump adds a layer of icing on top. He is not content to simply assert an untruth. He must assert the exact contrary of the truth. He must immediately project his own failings onto others.
It is as if Bill had said: Actually, Bob Dole had sexual relations with that woman!
The examples in which Trump has done this are now too many to list comprehensively. There is the fact that he is forever describing himself as the victim of a "coup," when he is the one who has promoted disinformation about the integrity of the vote designed to delegitimize the democratic process, who floated delaying the election and refused to agree to a peaceful transfer of power.
There was also the recent occasion on which Trump, the man who promotes Q-Anon conspiracy theories about George Soros, who privately denigrates Jewish people, who (ahem, "jokingly") called Jews "brutal killers" and questioned their loyalty to the United States, and who pointedly refused to condemn Neo-Nazis, now threatened to dub major human rights organizations critical of his policies "antisemitic."
There was the fact that Trump, who was impeached for bribing the Ukrainian head of state to undertake a politically-motivated bogus investigation of his rival, sought to base his entire pitch for reelection—the one and only "October surprise" he managed to cook up—on the discredited idea that his opponent was the one doing something fishy and unethical in Ukraine.
It's become the Trump playbook. Whatever one is guilty of oneself, just assert that one's adversaries are responsible for it. Whatever the weakest part of one's own record is, simply claim without any warrant that it is actually the enemy's weakness, not one's own. Transfer, project, at every turn. And it's totally unique in politics! It is Trump's distinctive technical contribution to the dark arts of propaganda.
Or is it? It certainly seems so to us, who have not witnessed any other president go so far in the past. Even Nixon stopped short at "I'm not a crook"—he didn't go the whole hog and say, "Whereas McGovern is!" "I didn't break into Watergate; the Democrats did!" Reagan and Oliver North may have tried to bury Iran-Contra. But they didn't shout: "We just discovered: the Democrats are selling arms to Iran!"
But we learn from Brecht that the technique only seems new to us because we have not looked back far enough in history. We have not been looking at nefarious enough breeds of demagogues in order to make our comparison. For it turns out that Brecht's fictional "housepainter" stand-in knew exactly how to apply the same method. As a character observes of him, in Brecht's Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui:
[Y]ou always come,/Returning to the scene of crime, accusing/ Others of your bloody deeds. 'I didn't do it,/It was someone else!'—'I know from nothing!' 'I've been raped!' cries Mr. Rape. And 'Call the cops!/There's been a murder!' Mr. Murder cries. (Tabori/Beaton trans.)
And so, as we part ways to cast our ballots this year and watch the returns come in, let us reflect on the fact that Brecht already had Trump's number, in writing of another tinpot bully, bruiser, and bigot so many years ago. Keep that in mind, when you decide who should be running our country's executive branch for the next four years.
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