By Timothy L. O’Brien / Bloomberg Opinion
Donald Trump is now the target of 78 criminal charges, courtesy of the latest federal indictment to land on his doorstep. The Justice Department and special counsel Jack Smith’s most recent salvo, accusing the former president of myriad illegal attempts to overturn the 2020 election, is an unsparing and devastating document, firmly grounded in the fact pattern.
But facts, however damning, have never troubled Trump.
His long-standing default response when presented with evidence that contradicts his wishes or self-esteem has been to lie. Sometimes he accomplishes this through deflection. Sometimes he creates his own reality distortion field. Like most serial fabulists or 7-year-olds, he knows deep down that he’s full of it; but he wants what he wants, and he won’t take no for an answer.
That mind-set should have disqualified him for the presidency, as any New Yorker, business competitor, government official or journalist who intersected with him in the years before the 2016 presidential election knew full well. He’s a dangerous brew of Barnumesque charisma, Aryan supremacy, Neanderthal thuggery and vaudevillian neediness.
Yet Trump’s supporters and defenders have accepted all of that — and often revel in it — because he traffics deftly in their resentments and aspirations. His most devoted voters see him as an authentic and dedicated advocate. His most forgiving allies, particularly Republicans who know better, see him as a useful idiot.
Quasi-adults, such as U.S. Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., dismissed this week’s federal charges against Trump as partisan handiwork. She said Trump wasn’t lying about the 2020 election results but merely exercising his free-speech rights to question them. He truly believed what he was saying. The indictment, she said in a bit of doublespeak, amounts to “an illegal attempt to interfere in the 2024 election.”
For whatever traction Stefanik might gain in political trenches from head fakes like these, they’re unlikely to hold sway in a courtroom given the evidence the Justice Department has assembled. As my colleague Noah Feldman has noted, the indictment is chock full of evidence that Trump knew he lost the 2020 vote. A flotilla of his own advisers, Republican legislators and judges told him so repeatedly.
“Trump was not deluded,” Feldman observed, summarizing the prosecution’s argument. “He was aware of his defeat. His goal was to delude the rest of us.”
Well, that’s presumptuous, Trump’s apologists will continue to argue. How can anyone get inside another person’s mind and know with absolute certainty that he’s lying? The media has also wrestled with that distinction throughout the Trump years, often declining to call Trump a liar in the service of objectivity and fairness despite abundant evidence he dissembled daily.
However honorable the media’s intentions, Trump isn’t your average public speaker. And he’s been lying for decades about almost everything he touches, including his business dealings, his personal life, his professional qualifications and his various achievements. After all, he’s the same guy who invented the term “truthful hyperbole” as a euphemism for lying in his 1987 nonfiction work of fiction, “The Art of the Deal.”
Trump sued me for libel in 2006 for a biography I wrote, “TrumpNation,” contending that the book misrepresented his track record and lowballed his wealth. Trump lost the suit in 2011, but during the litigation my lawyers deposed him under oath for two days in 2007.
Trump ultimately had to admit 30 times during that deposition that he had lied over the years about all sorts of stuff: his ownership stake in a big Manhattan real estate project; the price of one of his golf club memberships; the size of the Trump Organization; his wealth; his speaking fees; how many condos he had sold; his debts; and whether he had borrowed money from his family to avoid going personally bankrupt. He also lied during the deposition about his business dealings with career criminals.
Trump from an early age was steeped in lying as an alternative to taking responsibility for his actions. After his father, Fred, was barred from lucrative public housing contracts because of graft, both father and son blamed government overreach rather than Fred’s dishonesty for that particular exile.
So perhaps it was inevitable that someone like Trump would bring a bespoke heavy-handedness to the Oval Office. This week’s indictment notes that after Vice President Mike Pence refused to help him sabotage the 2020 election results, Trump dismissed Pence as “too honest.”
It’s impossible to know with absolute certainty what goes on in someone else’s head, as it is to know with absolute certainty about many things in life. But in a courtroom, the best a prosecutor can do is to convince a jury that a meaningful measure of certitude exists by assembling a preponderance of evidence.
Trump had a richly detailed track record of lying that preceded the events surrounding the Jan. 6 siege at the U.S. Capitol. The Justice Department indictment this week adds to that sorry catalogue.
Was Trump lying when he said the 2020 election was rigged? Of course he was. Is he lying whenever he says he truly believed his own lies about the election’s results? Of course. Will a jury be equally certain? I suspect it will.
None of that may keep Trump out of power, but that’s not the point. Justice is as justice does.
Timothy L. O’Brien is senior executive editor of Bloomberg Opinion. A former editor and reporter for the New York Times, he is author of “TrumpNation: The Art of Being the Donald.”
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