The Joy of Bullshit

[Celerity]

https://prospect.org/blogs-and-newsletters/tap/2025-09-05-trump-joy-of-bullshit/



In 1986, a moral philosophy professor and student of language at Princeton University named Harry Frankfurt published an erudite and witty article in the literary quarterly Raritan, circulation 1,100. Its title was “On Bullshit.” Frankfurt’s point was that bullshitting was fundamentally different from lying. Liars were aware of the truth that they were trying to contradict. Bullshitters simply made stuff up, and tended to believe their own bullshit. “It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth,” Frankfurt wrote. “Producing bullshit requires no such conviction.”

About 20 years later, during the reign of George W. Bush, when the bullshit about Iraq was flying thick and fast, an editor at Princeton University Press named Ian Malcolm rediscovered Frankfurt’s essay, and repackaged it as a book. Since the original article was only about 7,800 words, and books are typically at least ten times that length, Martin had to use large type, wide margins, and small pages. The book was marketed to be one of those little books that sit beside cash registers in bookstores. Princeton printed 5,000. The timing was perfect. The book hit number one on best-seller lists, went through several printings, and eventually sold over a million copies. Princeton, sensing another bullshit moment, has just republished a 20th anniversary edition.

In May 2016, when Trump was first running for president, Frankfurt concluded, in an essay published in Time magazine, that Trump was both a liar and a bullshitter. He wrote: “On the one hand, Trump makes false assertions, which he surely knows, or knows he could easily ascertain, to be false. On the other hand, he makes statements of whose truth he is uncertain—and he is indifferent to the fact that he doesn’t actually regard them as true. In the first case, he is telling a lie. In the second case, it’s bullshit.”

Harry Frankfurt died in 2023. I wish he were alive, so I could ask him how he judges Trump’s second term, where the balance seems to have shifted in the direction of sheer bullshit. The American economy is doing better than ever. Slavery wasn’t so bad. Democrats hate America. D.C. is a hellhole of crime. Trump just makes it up. Trump has also made bullshit a way of life in his administration. When RFK Jr. tells Congress that vaccines failed to prevent COVID, he believes his own bullshit.

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