By now, Rudy
Giuliani’s infamous declaration to NBC’s Chuck Todd (“Truth isn’t truth”) is
being touted as a strong candidate for the epitaph to the Trump presidency.
Probably too early, but it is indicative of the importance of truth in the
Trump administration, that bastion of alternative facts.
According to the
Washington Post’s fact-checking service, “In his first year as president, Trump
made 2,140 false or misleading claims. Now, just six months later, he has
almost doubled that total.” In his first 558 days in office, Trump made 4,229
false or misleading statements. I’ll do the math for you. That’s 7.58 lies per
day. But that statistic is misleading. As the Post points out, during his first
365 days, Trump lied at a rate of 5.86 per day. Over the next 193 days, Trump
upped his average to a whopping 10.82 lies per day. There are several
explanations for the rapid increase—his growing insecurity over the Mueller
investigation, his firing or chasing away of advisors who attempted to rein in
his fibbing, his expanding belief that his true devotees don’t care whether he
is truthful or not—but whatever combination of factors has produced this
blatant assault on truth, it is not healthy for our democratic republic. I’ll
come back to this point in a bit.
Personally, I
have always had a strong attachment to the truth. I don’t like being lied to,
by anyone. As an editor, I have a professional interest in truth. In fact, as I
have stated on this blog before, some time ago I came to the conclusion that it
is not my responsibility to defend Joseph Smith or the Church. It is my
responsibility to defend the truth, even though truth is sometimes very
difficult to ascertain. Nevertheless, we try. We must. At BYU Studies, we try
to get double-blind peer reviews of all articles to make sure the material
passes scholarly muster, and we send our student interns to the library or the
internet to source check these articles. I am sometimes disappointed in what they
discover. I will never forget an article that somehow made it through our
review process but nevertheless demonstrated why source checking is so
important. When our intern handed me her copy of the article, I found the
following comment in the margins in eighteen different places: “The source
doesn’t say this.” Argh. The article ended up being published, but it was
vastly different from the article the author had submitted. Playing fast and
loose with sources gets under my skin.
Another article
troubled me from the moment I read it. It was an examination of the legal cases
surrounding the ultimate demise of Joseph Smith. Central to this article, of
course, was the Nauvoo Expositor
episode. But not once in this long
article was the word polygamy ever
mentioned. I came as close to going ballistic over this article as I have ever
come. It represented the type of one-sided, apologetic history that has gotten
the Church in a lot of hot water and has caused faith crises in numerous Church
members. In the end, the article was published, and although I was not
completely pleased with the result, at least it contained some of the necessary
context surrounding Joseph Smith’s death.
This last example
raises an important point regarding truth. It is possible to make only factual
statements and still mislead. If you cherry-pick evidence so that you’re
telling only half the story, you can come to totally unwarranted conclusions.
Now, I realize it is impossible to give all evidence, and objectivity is always
an unreachable goal, but the closer we come to giving a balanced, complete, and
objective accounting of the facts, the better the result will be.
Truth can be a
tricky thing. Sometimes all we have to go on is sketchy evidence or carefully
crafted arguments employing logic and deduction. As Mormons, we sometimes think
revelation solves all problems regarding religious truth. But revelation has
not produced a theology that is without contradictions or gaping holes. LDS
theology has morphed and shifted over time. Some of the “truths” we now accept
disagree with earlier LDS teachings or with Book of Mormon theology. In fact, the
deeper I dig, the less I feel certain of. Everything is more complicated than a
superficial treatment will indicate.
In Mormondom, we
have become so dependent on certainty that we no longer ask difficult
theological questions or expect our leaders to seek theological revelations.
Most of the revelations our leaders receive nowadays are purely administrative
in nature, not theological. Perhaps this is due to the mistaken assumption that
our theology is settled, that there are no more questions to answer. But our
theology is far from complete. Some of the most basic questions remain
unanswered.
I’ve wondered if
this laziness among Mormons in seeking truth (or in assuming we already possess
it) has any connection to the fact that we, as a demographic group, vote
overwhelmingly for Republican candidates. Over the past thirty years or so, the
whole conservative project has moved steadily away from rigorous policy debate
and has embraced governance by sloganeering. The anti-intellectual climate in
the GOP is so strong now that anyone who actually knows anything is considered
suspect and branded as an “elite.” Expertise is a dirty word, especially among
Trumpettes. The Donald has enshrined ignorance and intellectual laziness as hallmarks
of his faux-populist movement.
I am disappointed that so many Mormons still
support Trump and turn a blind eye to the moral vacuum this man has brought to
politics. I believe this says something about us as a people, and what it says
is not complimentary. Truth is important. Without a fundamental commitment to
truth by political leaders, regular citizens like you and me lose the ability
to trust what our elected representatives say. We lose confidence in their
motives, their intentions, and their policies. If they say one thing and the
results prove that they have been playing us for suckers, we simply cannot
trust them, unless we are so gullible that we will believe anything.
The Trump
presidency is a disaster on so many fronts that it is a full-time job just
staying abreast of the latest outrages and ethical lapses. The events of the
past few days give almost irrefutable evidence to what should have obvious all
along. Trump appears to be completely amoral. In marriage, in business, and in
politics, he has shown that he believes no rule, no law applies to him. And he
has surrounded himself with individuals who are as corrupt as he is. Some would
excuse Trump with the truism that all politicians are corrupt, all politicians
lie. But that is a weak argument.
I was
disappointed in my fellow Mormon Mitt Romney in his run for the presidency. In 2012,
fact checkers routinely found that Romney was significantly more untruthful
than President Obama. Hilary Clinton, by the way, was untruthful about as
frequently as Obama. Romney’s trouble with the truth likely has much to do with
his Republican roots. You simply cannot espouse some Republican positions
without being disingenuous. It has been said before that facts tend to have a
liberal bias. This is becoming more and more true as the Republican Party
follows its recent trajectory and now fully embraces Trumpism. Supply-side
economics and human-caused climate change are two obvious examples of how
Republican talking points are simply “alternative facts.”
But I would take
Romney in a heartbeat over the current president. I believe Romney is a decent
human being with good intentions (and some faulty reasoning). Despite my
disagreement with some of his positions on issues, I don’t believe a Romney
presidency would have damaged our democracy. Trump, on the other hand, is a danger
to everything good about America. He has no acquaintance at all with truth.
Giuliani’s brazen claim that “truth isn’t truth” illustrates the moral cesspool
you end up in if you do not even know what truth is. If you assume that
whatever you say is truth, you end up making ridiculous claims and always having
to engage in mental and verbal gymnastics just to try to explain away what you
have said.
Truth is indeed
truth, and although it can sometimes be difficult to discern, pathological
liars like Trump never even concern themselves with the search for it. If it is
your goal, however, you will never mislead intentionally, and people will know
they can trust you. What we need in this country is a greater commitment to
truth, regardless of partisan politics.
P.S. In case you
were wondering, no, I am not going to change the name of this blog because of
the recent proclamation by President Nelson. While his hope is undoubtedly
noble, this new emphasis is ultimately impractical (or possibly impossible) in
the real world. It reminds me a great deal of the shift from home teaching to “ministering.”
The ramifications don’t appear to have been thought through carefully before the
change was announced. Consequently, I am no longer a home teacher. But I’m told
I am also not a minister. This program was installed without even a name for what
we ministering people are supposed to call ourselves. “Hi, Sister Jensen, Brother
Holmes and I are your new, um, whatever home teachers are now supposed to be
called.” It’s awkward, to say the least.