Anatomy Of A BS Artist

If you say it enough and keep saying it, they’ll start believing it. – Donald Trump

In 1986, Yale philosopher Harry Frankfurt published a seminal document on American politics in the era of Donald Trump, that is, from the time Trump began to dominate the national news as a political figure – say, 2016 – to the present. How was this possible?

Of course, when Frankfurt wrote his essay, “On Bullshit,” and then published it as a stand-alone little hardback with Princeton University Press in 2005, he wasn’t thinking about Trump, specifically. He didn’t generate his theory of bullshit from a singular sample. The very first sentence in the essay suggests that his interests were broad.

“One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit.”

Advertising. Public Relations. Talk radio. Social media. Conspiracism. Politics. We’re surrounded by bullshit. But what, exactly, is it? We use the term loosely, but Frankfurt thinks it may be possible to say something “helpful” about its core meaning. We need a “theory,” he says, so he proposes to offer a “theoretical understanding of bullshit” and “to articulate, more or less, sketchily, the structure of its concept.”

I claim that Frankfurt’s essay is a seminal document that helps us understand American politics more than 30 years after it was written. Is that bullshit? No. It’s a testament to an extraordinary prescience in his depiction of a character, a type, who was recently re-elected president of the United States, and to the explanatory power of Frankfurt’s theory.

Frankfurt gives us a theoretical account of bullshit, thereby at the same time describing the habitual deliverer of bullshit: the bullshitter. What we might call the Bullshit Artist.

I originally stumbled on the essay by accident. Two of my colleagues examined it with students in introductory philosophy courses. As I recall, I first read it at some point prior to the 2016 presidential campaign when Trump emerged as a serious candidate – well, when some people took him seriously as a candidate, although he was, and is, a profoundly unserious man who doesn’t deserve to be taken seriously as a politician.

As the campaign unfolded the torrent of falsehoods coming from Trump overwhelmed the fact-checkers. Even sober reporters in the prestige press – the conveyors of “fake news,” according to Trump – began to refer to his statements as lies, and since the pattern of his behavior was habitual, it was reasonable to call him a liar.

Enter Frankfurt and his important distinction between the liar, who knows the truth and deliberately wants to deceive us, and the bullshitter, who is unconcerned with truth.

At the time I thought it might be worthwhile to think about Trump in light of Frankfurt’s analysis of bullshit and to share the philosopher’s insights with a general audience, without footnotes or endnotes, elements of my usual professional style of expression. The result was my first essay published in this very journal, February 2017. The original title, “Truth Trumps Bullshit,” was changed to “Trump’s Barnyard Bloviating,” a wise editorial decision probably made to avoid an offensive title.

Eight years later I re-read Frankfurt’s essay, my return occasioned by striking instances of Trump’s bullshit on the campaign trail and in post-election venues, as well as my memory of Frankfurt’s provocative thesis – that “bullshit is a greater enemy of truth than lies are” – and my conviction that we miss something significant about Trump and his insidious effect on our social and political life if we disregard Frankfurt’s fundamental distinction and the analytical details that arise as he fleshes out the structure of the concept of bullshit.

The basic distinction is clear enough, although it’s natural to mistake the bullshitter for the liar. The difference rests in their respective states of mind, not in the falsehoods they utter.

Someone who lies knows the truth and deliberately tries to deceive us. As Frankfurt says, the liar recognizes the authority of truth, as the honest person does, in the sense that he admits there is something that is the case, but he tries to deceive us and hopes the truth won’t catch up to him, in which case he will presumably be forced to change his tune.

The bullshitter is playing a different game. The bullshitter doesn’t really reject the authority of truth, as the liar does; he simply “ignores these demands.” The bullshitter “pays no attention” to the way things are.

When speaking, he doesn’t care about what’s true. His goals are different. Because of this unconcern the bullshitter is a greater enemy of the truth than the liar.

Consider an example from Trump’s campaign. He said at one of his rallies: “Tariffs are the greatest thing ever invented.” As Herschel Walker might say, think about it.

Sometimes Trump tells quite specific falsehoods, for example, about the 2020 election, moments in which he comes closest to being merely a liar, depending on his own state of mind, whether he really believed that he lost in a fair election but spread lies anyway.

At other times he gasses hyperbolic superlatives, the best, worst, greatest … in history. Tariffs – not fire, the wheel, the printing press, electricity, vaccinations, the semiconductor, the personal computer, the internet, AI – are the greatest things ever invented! The claim is self-serving bullshit, since he wants to be Tariff Man.

Is he lying? Not exactly. Frankfurt describes a “Fourth of July orator, who goes on bombastically about ‘our great and blessed country, whose Founding Fathers under divine guidance created a new beginning for mankind.’” The orator “would be lying only if it were his intention to bring about in his audience beliefs he himself regards as false.”

According to Frankfurt the orator doesn’t really care what the audience thinks about the Founding Fathers. Rather, “the orator intends these statements to convey a certain impression of himself. What he cares about is what people think of him.”

Trump’s bullshit about tariffs is akin to other types of claims he makes, when he gasses about what he will do [or has done].

“When I win, I will immediately bring prices down, starting on Day One.”

“I’ll get the price of a gallon of gas down to $2 as president.”

“I’ll end the war in Ukraine in the first 24 hours in office.”

Again, he’s not lying, he’s bullshitting. These claims are preposterous. He’s posturing. He’s conveying a certain impression of himself that some voters bought: omnipotent savior!

Trump’s narcissism is the ground of his bullshit, which Frankfurt says is “careless” and “self-indulgent.” “Thoughtful attention to detail requires discipline and objectivity,” characteristics that are missing in the bullshitter’s approach to life.

Here’s another important difference between the liar and the bullshit artist, the person who takes “no interest in whether what she says is true or false.” Their focus is different. Frankfurt quotes a character in a novel by Eric Ambler: “Never tell a lie when you can bullshit your way through.”

The character thought “it is easier to get away with bullshitting than with lying.” Why? Because “telling a lie is an act of sharp focus.” But bullshitting one’s way through “ … involves a program of producing bullshit to whatever extent the circumstances require.”

When we think of Trump as a bullshit artist, we understand him as doing something more general than spewing specific falsehoods that he may or may not believe. “His focus is panoramic rather than particular.” Bullshitting is a way of life, a program of invention rather than inquiry or discovery.

Perhaps the best we can say is that a bullshit artist may evince a lively imagination which may, unfortunately, masquerade as truth-telling when we desperately need the truth – about vaccines, climate change, immigrants, ending wars, government agencies and programs, the mechanics and probable effects of tariffs, and much more.

Throughout the essay Frankfurt is interested in teasing out ways that persons misrepresent things and themselves. Here’s another connection that enlightens us about the Bullshit-Artist-in-Chief. “It does seem that bullshitting involves a kind of bluff. It is closer to bluffing, surely, than to telling a lie.”

The bullshitter dares us to call his bluff. When we do, the accomplished bullshit artist dodges, weaves, and doubles down. Showing Trump the plain facts doesn’t work, since the facts must be fake. His epistemic bubble is self-sealing.

Frankfurt adds: “For the essence of bullshit is not that it is false but that it is phony.”

One of the most astonishing paradoxes of Trump’s public demeanor is that his supporters think he’s authentic, a true warrior ready to slay woke liberal enemies at every turn, when, in fact, he’s a big fat phony. Authenticity? A very stable genius? No, the persona is a counterfeit.

“What is wrong with a counterfeit is not what it is like, but how it is made. This points to a similar and fundamental aspect of the essential nature of bullshit: although it is produced without concern with truth, it need not be false. The bullshitter is faking things. But this does not mean that he necessarily gets them wrong.”

But if he does sometimes get things right it will be a happy accident, since his approach is not truth-guided, which means that it is all the more important for us to never trust the bullshit artist, since he is so unreliable.

Frankfurt thinks we are aware that there is a lot of bullshit in our culture, but “we tend to take the situation for granted,” and we are “rather confident” in “our ability to recognize bullshit and to avoid being taken in by it.”

Don’t most people believe they possess a finely tuned, well-oiled bullshit detector? Yet, when we think of Trump’s electoral successes, the irony is grotesque. He virtually tells people he doesn’t care about truth. “If you say it enough and keep saying it, they’ll start believing it.”

So true, Mr. President. So true. MAGA voters now have what they deserve, the most powerful bullshitter in the world as their president.

When I think about the bullshit artist and the art of bullshit detection I think of Big Bob, one of the large characters that appeared in my life. He was, quite literally, large, well over 300 pounds, which made his claims about extraordinary youthful athletic achievements hard to believe. It was difficult to imagine an athlete dwelling somewhere inside his massive, fleshy obese body.

He had what might loosely be called an oral personality, in a pop-psychological sense: loud, overbearing, addicted to food, smoking and drinking, and tall tales; a constant stream of fantastic stories and claims flowed from his mouth.

A conversation with Big Bob quickly became a fabulist monologue. He was always trying to impress us – he was needy – our recognition required for his self-esteem.

We didn’t engage in much fact-checking, as it is called now. But we had the sense that Big Bob’s imagination ran well ahead of his commitment to reality. To say he was a liar didn’t quite fit. He was full of hot air, but he wasn’t dangerous. We were amused by his talk. He was just so full of baloney, we thought, a harmless, pathetic blowhard whose perpetual attempts to impress us fell flat. He was a phony, a benign fraud, and everyone knew it. He fooled no one.

At one point Frankfurt claims we’re easier on the bullshitter than the liar. “In fact, people do tend to be more tolerant of bullshit than of lies, perhaps because we are less inclined to take the former as a personal affront.”

Yes, I suppose we were relatively tolerant of Big Bob’s bullshit. I was sorry for him, found him irritating after a while, but I was never angry with him, as I would have been if he had lied about something that concerned me personally. But … what if Big Bob somehow pulled off a political miracle and became a powerful politician? Wouldn’t, shouldn’t, our attitudes toward him change?

Frankfurt: “The problem of understanding why our attitude toward bullshit is generally more benign than our attitude toward lying is an important one, which I shall leave as an exercise for the reader.”

Regardless of our respective attitudes toward the liar and the bullshitter, I wonder whether painting Trump as a bullshit artist rather than a danger to democracy might have been a better strategy for Democrats, especially when directed towards MAGA voters who believed he would immediately bring down grocery prices, end wars, and rid us of pet-eating immigrants. They might very well have understood there are always people like Big Bob among us, and one of them was running for president.

This essay first appeared in the March 2025 print edition of The Oklahoma Observer.