While former president Donald Trump faces numerous serious challenges in courts of law, he is — his adversaries say — held far less strictly to account in various courts of public opinion.
Trump’s supporters assert that the public opinion courts have it right, and take Trump for the innocent man he portrays himself to be. Or at least, says Democratic elections lawyer Marc Elias, they don’t care very much if he is innocent, because they admire the way he flouts the law and twists the truth — in ways they could never get away with.
Elias usually works in the more rigorous and demanding courts — the rule-based judicial environment that requires evidence and punishes fabrications with losses and charges of perjury. There, in real American courtrooms with high standards for burden of proof, Elias has prevailed in more than 60 election fraud cases brought by Trump and his associates and supporters.
But commenting on Trump’s relative success in the court of public opinion, which functions without hard rules and lofty burdens of proof, Elias says Trump doesn’t necessarily get people to believe his “fantastical lies” so much as respect his ability to tell them.
Talking with Brian Tyler Cohen, Elias says: “The authoritarian starts to lie so fabulously that his followers know he’s lying, but they take pride in the fact that he is able to pull it off… They view him as clever for having been able to tell such fantastical lies. It’s a sign of his virtue that he’s able to lie. And that is definitely where Donald Trump is with his supporters.”
.@marceelias: “The authoritarian starts to lie so fabulously that his followers know he’s lying, but they take pride in the fact that he is able to pull it off… They view him as clever for having been able to tell such fantastical lies; it’s a sign of his virtue that he’s able… pic.twitter.com/S2giz9XCn0
— Brian Tyler Cohen (@briantylercohen) June 22, 2024
Elias’s idea that it’s a “sign of [Trump’s] virtue that he’s able to lie” — as counterintuitive as it sounds — has backing in historical studies of authoritarian rule, a lane prominently occupied at the moment by NYU history professor Ruth Ben-Ghiat.
Crazy dictator language, use of third person sounds like Idi Amin at his most manic. The ad for the free Trump knife is perfect with Trump speaking about himself in the past tense. https://t.co/8QPRknKNnf
— Ruth Ben-Ghiat (@ruthbenghiat) June 23, 2024
But Elias’s comment also feeds Trump’s followers fresh ammunition for the accusation that Trump’s opponents suffer from “Trump Derangement Syndrome.”
That is a term of art that Trump and his supporters use to explain away any criticism of him as a delirium on the part of the left — or even old school Republicans on the right, such as the many former Trump orbit people who have characterized him as unfit for the presidency.