Deceitful Power and Impotent Truth: Hannah Arendt Meets Donald Trump
“Is not impotent truth just as despicable as power that gives no heed to truth?”
Mixing narcissism and fascism is deadly for both truth and politics. Narcissists twist reality to be mostly about themselves, and fascists regard politics as a life-and-death struggle for absolute power. If, as I’ve suggested in previous posts, Donald Trump is both a narcissist and a fascist, then that sheds light on why, as New York Times columnist Thomas Edsall noted more than two years ago, Trump can claim the title of “most prodigious liar in the history of the [United States] presidency.” For Trump must repeatedly make claims that inflate his own prowess and help accrue more power. His administration’s violent vainglory reflects this.
Liar in Chief?
Many scholars and journalists have tried to account for Trump’s inordinate lying or, as some prefer, his compulsive bullshitting. Americans have never before witnessed political deceitfulness on such an overwhelming scale. In January 2021, fact checkers at The Washington Post calculated that Trump had publicly made 30,573 false or misleading claims during the four years of his first term as President—an astonishing average of 21 erroneous claims per day. A similar calculation for the first nine months of his second term would be equally off the charts.
Official presidential portrait of Donald J. Trump, 2025, by Daniel Torok, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Wikipedia has a long article on this titled “False or Misleading Statements by Donald Trump.” Among the books cited is a social-psychological study by Dan P. McAdams titled The Strange Case of Donald J. Trump (Oxford University Press, 2020). In a chapter titled “Truth” (pp. 96-118), McAdams tries to explain why Donald Trump tells more lies than any other American public official, and why his supporters accept his lies. For McAdams, the key is that Trump has no intact sense of self. Rather, he’s an “episodic man.” That’s why, for Trump “truth is effectively whatever it takes to win the moment, moment by moment, battle by battle—as the episodic man, shorn of any long-term story to make sense of his life, struggles to win the moment. Among the many reasons that Trump’s supporters excuse his lying is that they, like Trump himself, do not really hold him to the standards that human persons are held to. And that is because many of his supporters, like Trump himself, do not consider him to be a person—he is more like a primal force or superhero, more than a person, but less than a person, too.”
If McAdams is right, as I suspect he is, then both factual accuracy and political constraints go out the presidential window; speaking truth to power becomes extremely difficult; and Hannah Arendt’s question, quoted above, becomes even more pressing: “Is not impotent truth just as despicable as power that gives no heed to truth?” In this blog post and the next one, I’d like to reflect on her question.
Hannah Arendt (1906 – 1975)
Hannah Arendt (1958). Photo by Barbara Niggl Radloff, Münchner Stadtmuseum, Sammlung Fotografie, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
This December 4 marks the fiftieth anniversary of Hannah Arendt’s death. An only child born to German Jewish parents in 1906, Arendt studied with leading existential philosophers—most notably Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers—and became one of the most important political theorists in the twentieth century. After the Gestapo briefly imprisoned her for doing allegedly illegal research on antisemitism, she fled Nazi Germany and settled first in Paris (1933-1941). Then she emigrated to the United States and remained there until her death in 1975.
Arendt is best remembered for three books whose themes gain renewed relevance from the current worldwide revival of authoritarian populism. The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), written in the aftermath of World War Two, offers a comprehensive diagnosis of antisemitism, imperialism, and totalitarianism, with a view to understanding both Stalinism and Nazism.
The Human Condition (1958) considers the prospects for genuine political dialogue in an age of consumer capitalism and bureaucratic administration.
Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963) examines the 1961 trial and conviction of Adolf Eichmann, chief implementer of the Nazis murdering 6 million Jews, their “final solution.” Arendt uses this occasion to reflect on why seemingly ordinary people support and commit unspeakable crimes against humanity. For that she proposed an oft misunderstood phrase: “the banality of evil.”
Truth and Politics
Many controversies greeted Eichman in Jerusalem. These prompted Arendt to write “Truth and Politics,” a seminal essay first published by The New Yorker in 1967. [I cite this essay from The Portable Hannah Arendt, ed. Peter Baehr (New York: Penguin Books, 2000), 545–75, and use the abbreviation “TP.”] Her essay opens with three searing questions about the relation between truth and politics: “Is it of the very essence of truth to be impotent and of the very essence of power to be deceitful? And what kind of reality does truth possess if it is powerless in the public realm? Is not impotent truth just as despicable as power that gives no heed to truth?” (TP 545-6)
Arendt’s questions have new urgency today. Now, however, the issues are not merely whether political speech unavoidably distorts the truth or simply how to speak truth to power. Just as urgent is the question whether truth itself can survive the onslaught of authoritarian post-truth politicians like Donald Trump, with their daily attacks on history, science, journalists, and the public sphere. Whereas Arendt cautioned philosophers to steer clear of political power, lest politics corrupt philosophical truth, today’s philosopher must directly resist the politicians in power, lest they destroy truth itself. Her essay gives us a place to begin.
Arendt asks whether truth is by nature politically impotent and whether political power is essentially deceitful. After exploring why such questions arise, she concludes that truth has a strength of its own, such that truthtellers can speak truth to political power. Yet, in defending the political value of speaking truth to power, Arendt insists that truthtelling is essentially nonpolitical. And this, I’ll suggest, limits how she understands both truth and politics.
Opinions, Facts, and Organized Lying
Arendt begins the essay with reflections on the abiding worth of truthtelling. Then she distinguishes between rational truth (the sort of truth pursued by philosophy) and factual truth (the sort of truth established by historical inquiry and public discussion) (TP 548). Factual truth is what Arendt considers both vulnerable to political abuse and crucial for challenging political power.
Indeed, an increasingly large-scale clash has developed between politics and factual truth, she says. This clash arises from what she calls organized lying. Organized lying takes two political forms: the totalitarianism of Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia, which tabooed public discussion of unwelcome facts; and hypercommercialism in so-called free countries, where “unwelcome factual truths … are often … transformed into [mere] opinions” (TP 552)—a tendency made even worse by today’s slogans about “fake news” and “alternative facts.”
But how do factual truth and opinion differ? In Arendt’s view, both opinions and facts inhabit the political realm, where many different views seek common ground. Both opinions and facts are the stuff of public discussion. Yet this does not mean facts are simply opinions: “Facts inform opinions, and opinions … can differ widely and still be legitimate as long as they respect factual truth. Freedom of opinion is a farce unless factual information is guaranteed” (TP 554). So factual truth about current and historical events cannot be a matter of mere opinion. Nor can opinions replace the facts.
Arendt highlights two respects in which factual truth differs from opinion. First, factual assertions claim “coercive” validity. In that sense, facts, unlike opinions, are not debatable. A true factual statement such as “In August 1914 Germany invaded Belgium” (and not, for example, “Belgium invaded Germany”!) is “beyond agreement, dispute, … or consent” (TP 555). Second, facts have an “annoying contingency.” They are what they are. Whereas opinions can easily change, stubborn facts cannot (TP 557).
Opinion is not the most forceful opponent of factual truth, however. More damaging still is deliberate falsehood or lying. For, although truthtellers have the stubborn facts on their side, liars have the political advantage: they can always mold the “facts” to fit partisan or commercial interests.
Arendt is especially concerned with “the relatively recent phenomenon of mass manipulation of fact and opinion” in so-called free countries (TP 564). Carried to the extreme, such mass manipulation destroys “the category of truth vs. falsehood,” which we need in order to “take our bearings in the real world” (TP 568). Yet she takes comfort from the stubbornness of facts, which not even the most deceptive politician can undo: “In their stubbornness, facts are superior to power” (TP 570).
Telling the Truth
Faced with the opposition between organized political lying and stubbornly persistent factual truth, how should we understand the political role of the truthteller? In contrast to political power, truth “possesses a strength of its own,” Arendt says; to uphold this strength, truthtellers must stand outside politics (TP 570). Truthtelling’s essentially apolitical standpoint is one of being alone: “the solitude of the philosopher, the isolation of the scientist and the artist, the impartiality of the historian and the judge, and the independence of the fact-finder, the witness, and the reporter” (TP 570-1). Pursuing these various modes of truthtelling precludes having a specific political commitment or adhering to a particular political cause, she says.
Moreover, by placing limits on the political realm, the truth frees all of us to be genuinely political, Arendt suggests. To be genuinely political is to form one’s opinions about human affairs “by considering a given issue from differing viewpoints” and imagining “how I would feel and think if I were in their place” (TP 556). It is a representative effort. And even here, in the midst of politics, impartiality rather than narrow self-interest or group partisanship must prevail. The “very quality” of a political judgment depends, Arendt says, “upon the degree of its impartiality” (TP 557).
Accordingly, although Arendt begins her essay by distinguishing rational truth from factual truth, and although she highlights many conflicts between factual truth and political power, implicit all along has been a third sort of truth, not actually labeled as such. Perhaps we can call it the truth of genuine politics, the truth that both guides and issues from thoughtful political deliberation.
Two Questions
The prospect of such political truth, at which Arendt’s essay only hints, raises difficult questions she does not address. One is why the standpoint of solitary truthtellers such as scholars and journalists must lie outside the political domain. If political truth-seekers can remain impartial while they engage in political deliberation, why wouldn’t this be possible for solitary truthtellers such as scholars and journalists?
Another question concerns the political character of political truth. It seems that gaining and exercising power are intrinsic to politics as such, including the participatory democracy Arendt strongly prefers. Yet most of her essay concerns conflicts between truth and political power. And that makes it hard to envision a truth-seeking mode of political deliberation that is not either impotent or marginal, one that would actually make a political difference. If organized lying can be as damaging to factual truth as Arendt rightly suggests, why would it not be even more destructive of genuine political deliberation? The daily shenanigans of the Trump administration make this a pressing question.
Even though Arendt does not simply pit truth against politics, then, I do not think she has successfully reimagined the relation between them. I’ll present my own approach in a subsequent post.
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