When US Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem declared that a 37-year-old Minneapolis mother had been gunned down by federal officials because she was committing “an act of domestic terrorism,” she was not making a factual claim. She was seeking a megalomaniac’s approval. Her boss, US President Donald Trump, soon rewarded her zeal, posting on Truth Social that the victim “violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE Officer.” Vice President JD Vance then dutifully proclaimed that “the gaslighting is off the charts,” dismissing all criticism as lies.
The irresistible allure of sycophancy had kicked in. To maintain the leader’s favour, his underlings desperately competed to see who could most thoroughly abase themselves on TV. Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, having watched multiple videos of the shooting captured by bystanders, called the administration’s claims “bullshit.” That epithet resonates, but it is not the whole story.
A distinguished philosopher once drew a sharp distinction between the liar and the bull shitter. The liar, he argued, is paradoxically oriented toward truth: to lie successfully, one must know what is true and deliberately say the opposite. The bullshitter, by contrast, is indifferent to whether his statements are true or false; what matters is only the effect on the audience. Because the liar still operates within a framework where truth matters, lying presupposes a grudging respect for the category it violates. Bullshit, by ignoring the distinction between truth and falsity altogether, is a more corrosive enemy of honest exchange and debate.
But Trump’s relationship to the truth does not fall clearly into either category. His lies are not meant to deceive. They certainly don’t fool his critics, who recognise them instantly, but nor do they fool many of his followers. His most prominent subordinates surely know what nonsense they are spouting. Nor is he simply indifferent to the commonsense distinction between truth and falsehood. Instead, the purpose of Trump’s chronic lying is twofold.
First, he wants to demonstrate the impotence of truth in political contestation. Paying no price for telling easily detectable untruths is an effective way to display power and impunity. For the lie to demonstrate power, the public must recognise it as a lie. The fact-checkers can exhaust themselves; it changes nothing.
Second, and more insidiously, these lies function as loyal ty tests – rituals of submission that compel followers to demonstrate their willingness to be transformed into automatons. To repeat an obvious falsehood is to surrender independent judgment, to sever oneself from the reality-based community, and to prove that allegiance to the leader exceeds any attachment to truth. This is darker than bullshit: it is the deliberate destruction of the epistemic foundations of democratic life by someone who is instinctively demolishing a world that has always made him feel small.
Trump, Noem, and Vance are not politicians making premature judgments that they will later regret. They are reciting obvious falsehoods for the same reason their supporters repeat the Big Lie about the 2020 election: the mendacity is essential to the function.
If a Trump loyalist wanted to express support for immigration enforcement, he could cite accurate statistics or repeat defensible claims about public safety. But anyone can agree with a true statement. The distinguishing mark of loyalty – the proof of submission – is the willingness to repeat something everyone knows is false. There is no motive for regurgitating an obvious lie except to demonstrate fealty.
That is why fact-checking has no effect. MAGA enthusiasts do not believe these lies to be true in the ordinary sense. What they believe in is the potency of lying as a means of separating “true” Americans from false ones. Every statement of fact dissolves into a declaration of membership. The red hat signals tribal identi ty; the repeated lie confirms it. To say that Renee Nicole Good committed “domestic terrorism” – when the videos show her trying to flee – is a test of allegiance. It represents a decision to burn all bridges connecting one to the world of people who still value accuracy over loyalty. For those who pass the test, the reward is a sense of belonging. They win admission into a community where shared falsehoods create the intimacy of shared secrets.
Moreover, Trump does not believe that his critics speak the truth out of devotion to veracity. Rather, he sees them deploying truths – Barack Obama was born in Hawaii; Joe Biden won the 2020 election; Trump was Jeffrey Epstein’s close friend – instrumentally, to hurt him and serve their partisan agenda. In his mind, the distinction between truth and falsehood is not moral but tactical. His enemies’ accuracy reflects no integrity; their willingness to correct mistakes signals no virtue. For Trump, truth-telling, like lying, is simply a weapon of war, and he has no intention of unilaterally disarming.
Given this, why would this obsessively self-centred man consider truth-tellers his moral superiors when he “knows” that the only reason they speak truths is to harm him? When Vance accused journalists of “gaslighting” for describing what the videos plainly show, he was projecting. Gaslighting is when you make people doubt their own perceptions of reality, which is precisely what Vance was demanding. The accusation functions as enforcement, pressuring viewers to take sides against the “radical left lunatics” who are ruining the country.
For this administration, the gravest threat is not foreign. It is internal: critics, protesters, journalists, Democrats. These American citizens are now “the enemy within.” And as Minneapolis grimly portends, bullets may not long be reserved for foreign adversaries alone. Are poorly trained Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents and redeployed border guards likely to respond with professional discipline if angry protestors continue to flood the streets?
Good’s killing was certainly a tragedy and almost certainly a crime. The administration’s response is something else: a demonstration that, in Trump’s America, regurgitating obvious lies is how high officials prove their worth. Survival in Trump’s orbit requires a robotic renunciation of conscience and a performative lobotomization of the self.
The writer is Professor of Law at New York University School of Law.