Near the end of his book Madoff: The Final Word, written shortly before our president won his second term, Richard Behar asks comparative questions about the con man Bernard Madoff and Donald Trump, including: “Do the 2020 presidential election deniers have anything in common with investors who blindly followed Madoff? And can denial be contagious and transmissible across huge segments of society?”
It may seem that Madoff investors have much in common with the election deniers and others who accept Trump’s falsehoods, but there are different dynamics at work for each. With Madoff, many have said that the investors should have known that their returns were too good to be true. Gains of fifteen percent or more every year, every quarter no matter if the market or the economy was up or down were beyond belief, so how could anyone believe them? The question ignores human nature. Few challenge something that is benefiting them. Human nature and history have produced relevant adages. Don’t kill the goose that lays golden eggs. Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth. Madoff apparently delivered golden eggs. Such a goose is unbelievable, but if I had one, I would not probe it to see how it was constructed in case the eggs would no longer come.
Behar tries to find out why the Securities and Exchange Commission was not on to Madoff much earlier than it was. The SEC does not have enough resources to monitor closely all the investment businesses in the country. Their investigations are invariably triggered by complaints, and those invariably come from those who lose money. No one complained about Madoff. Investors only thought that they were making gains.
There are reasons that since the time of Charles Ponzi over a hundred years ago (and no doubt before), humans have been willing to believe the promises of Ponzi and related pyramid schemes. That is human nature for many of us.
Unlike Madoff investors, Trump supporters who accept his falsehoods do not get a direct material reward. But many of them have a sense of grievance. They feel that their lives are not as good as they should be, and America is not as great as it should be. It does not matter if Trump is divorced from factual truth as long as what he says feels true about their grievances. After all, what are facts compared to what I honestly feel?
Think back, if you are old enough, to Ronald Reagan when something similar happened. Reagan was politically popular even though polls often showed widespread disagreement with many of his specific proposals and policies. Even so, Reagan was able to project an overall message that resonated with many. Ethan Bronner in Battle for Justice: How the Bork Nomination Shook America examines the phenomenon and finds this lesson: “People would go with you if they were attracted to the feel of your campaign, even if they disagreed with many aspects of it.”
The roots of these dynamics predate those Republican presidents. Sources can be found in the academy of a generation ago. How to read a novel was debated in graduate schools. Was the goal to find the author’s intentions? The response increasingly became that the readers should seek individual significance, what a book meant to them. Since each reader had unique experiences and perspectives, a book had no single meaning, and all the meanings discovered in the literary piece were equally valid. A novel did not have a single, objective “truth” but many subjective ones. Meaning was “contingent” depending on the reader’s perspective. This was said to be a “postmodern” reading.
Such thinking jumped the literary fence into other disciplines. Some maintained that societal truth varies depending upon your experiences and perspectives. Your viewpoint shapes what is true for you. There are multiple truths that should be respected. From the path seeking to broaden understanding of why people hold different opinions and viewpoints, this broadened into the assertion that there is no objective reality and that truth and morality were only “contingent.” This led to the conclusion that all opinions should be considered and analyzed, and that all opinions must be respected. However, this respect morphed for some into the idea that all opinions were of equal validity. If something were true for you, then it was true. Facts were always subjective. There was no objective truth.
This philosophy became associated with lefties who maintained that not only was history written by the winners, but that the winners, the privileged, controlled societal “reality” and “truth.” Their reminder that things looked different depending on where you stood in the societal hierarchies was valuable. “Truth” and “reality” were contingent, but conservatives lashed out and mocked those who could not tell right from wrong or could not tell there was a recognizable, firm truth.
We have had a switch. Now “conservatives” say something similar to what leftists said in the past. Rudy Giuliani, for example, stated that truth is relative. Other conservatives have spoken of “alternative facts.” Conservatives deny evidence about climate change suggesting that science, too, is relative–that it is only political. Conservatives seem to have adopted postmodernism, but they have gone beyond it.
In this postmodernistic world, we don’t have to go to the trouble of ascertaining what is true because what matters is what is true for me. Many of his supporters surely know that what Trump says is not only false but errant bullshit, but he says what the Trumpistas want to believe. The important thing is that what he says feels true to his audience. And if it feels true to them, then it is true.
The appeal and power of accepting falsehoods because they feel right, because they are true for me, should not be underestimated. We might think that when everybody has their own truth individuals are separated from each other and the world is atomistic. It is true that in the postmodernist world I don’t have to engage with those who hold other truths. I can remain segregated from them, but believing in falsehoods also brings people together. What Lawrence Wright in Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood and the Prison of Belief wrote about a new religious movement has broader applicability: “Belief in the irrational is one definition of faith, but it is also true that clinging to absurd or disputed doctrines binds a community of faith together and defines a barrier to the outside world.”
Wright’s insight helps explain our modern world. Many who believe that we should distinguish truth from non-truth to formulate policies and action have their own faith in rationality. They are surprised that as the breadth, depth, and frequency of Trump’s bullshit becomes increasingly apparent that Trumpistas have not fallen away. These rationalists see the falsehoods as a negative for Trump, but in fact they are a source of the president’s strength. His falsehoods have produced a feeling that such utterances must be true, ought to be true, are at least emotionally true. As a result, they have bound his supporters together, helping to define a needed barrier with the rest of society.
In this world, it is enough to say that it could be true, it might be true, or it has not been disproved to my personal satisfaction. This world does not have to abide by the standards of good historical, scientific, sociological, or anthropological inquiry. Acolytes don’t have to grapple with the strengths and weaknesses of sets of data. Well, yes. Life is a lot easier without that hard work. Others can foolishly spend their time looking for facts and truth, but we don’t need to. The truth is what we want it to be. And this prevents Trumpistas from having to change their views. They never have to confront what T.H. Huxley said about science: “The great tragedy of science—the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.” Leisure increases and life is simpler without a responsibility for discerning or establishing facts. I can just stop with my inquiry once something feels right for me. I don’t have to uncomfortably confront information or views I don’t like and the conflicts, external and internal, that they can cause. My belief is as true as yours. Discourse, analysis, and research are all a waste of time. My life is easier.
A sizeable portion of the population does not care whether what Trump says is true or not, much less whether he believes what he says is true or that he knows, like the liar, that it is not true. A sizeable audience is indifferent to how things really are. In words of Harry Frankfort (see post of August 22, 2025 “Trump versus Madoff”), this group is content to be fed bullshit, and that, alas, almost guarantees that bullshit will proliferate.
