On Trump Logic

What the handling of the Melania Trump plagiarism fiasco tells us about how the Trump machine works.

Monday at the Republican National Convention (RNC), Melania Trump delivered an address which included a passage plagiarized almost verbatim from Michelle Obama’s 2008 address at the Democratic National Convention (DNC).  The overlap between the two texts consisted chiefly of panegyrics of American values such as “you work hard in life,” “you treat people with respect,” and “the only limit to your achievements is the strength of your dreams and your willingness to work for them.”

Tuesday morning, Trump’s campaign chairman Paul Manafort denied, live on CNN, that any plagiarism at all had occurred.  His argument in Mrs. Trump’s defense: "To think that she would do something like that knowing how scrutinized her speech was going to be last night is just really absurd.”

While it may sound like standard-issue political bulls***, the dubious logical maneuver Manafort is pulling here is actually a very specific logical shift.  Digging into the nature of this shift and its particular history in philosophy reveals why Manafort’s defense is not only sort of stupid but also dangerous and exposes the hidden premise that makes the entire Trump machine both impossible to restrain and inherently dangerous to American democracy.

Technically, what Manafort is doing in this quote is turning a modens ponens accusation into a modus tollens defense, which is an abstruse way of saying that he’s denying the conclusion in order to overturn the evidence, rather than the typical approach of vice versa.  But this gambit (like Mrs. Trump’s speech) is not an original idea: it was famously employed by the British philosopher G.E. Moore in the mid-twentieth century.  By Moore’s time, extreme skeptics in philosophy had been pointing out more or less continuously for three centuries that the entire world might be a fake, an illusion perpetrated by demons or even by our own minds, and that it was therefore impossible to know anything for certain.  This was very annoying, and Moore, like many others, felt (rather understandably) that the whole thing was absurd and someone should rebut it once and for all.  He noted that the skeptics’ argument was fundamentally structured like this:

1. If the world might be an illusion, we can’t really know anything.
2. The world might be an illusion.
3. We can’t really know anything.

Moore’s rebuttal was to hold up his hands mid-lecture and say, “Here is one hand!  Here is another!”  This (he claimed) proved that he did in fact know things - namely, that he had two hands - and therefore the world must not be an illusion.  In other words:

1. (1)  If the world might be an illusion, we can’t really know anything.
2. (3) We can really know things.
3. (2) The world can’t be an illusion.

It’s important to note that this argument only works if you grant that Moore’s assertion of having two hands is quite certain, or at least infinitely more certain than the assertion that the world might be an illusion.  That’s the hidden premise the Moorean shift requires, and it’s one that doesn’t seem out of the question to concede.

But back to Melania Trump.  In the wake of the plagiarism revelation, the reaction of readers across the country seems to be a kind of flabbergasted stare that carries both disdain and outright confusion.  And if you look closely, you can sense the wheels behind the plate-sized eyes churning through an implicit logical structure that looks something like this:

1. Only an idiot would plagiarize the current first lady’s DNC address for the 2016 first-lady-hopeful’s RNC address.
2. Someone in Trump’s campaign just plagiarized the current first lady’s DNC address for the 2016 first-lady-hopeful’s RNC address.
3. Someone in the Trump campaign is an idiot.

Manafort, on the other hand, is trying to turn this on its head and argue that:

1. (1) Only an idiot would plagiarize the current first lady’s DNC address for the 2016 first-lady-hopeful’s RNC address.
2. (3) No one in the Trump campaign is an idiot.
3. (2) No one in Trump’s campaign just plagiarized the current first lady’s DNC address for the 2016 first-lady-hopeful’s RNC address.

As in G.E. Moore’s argument, the hidden premise that makes this shift feasible is that (3) is totally certain, or at least astronomically more certain than (2) - in this case, that the assertion that no one in the Trump campaign is an idiot is astronomically more certain than the assertion that the speech was plagiarized.  The fact that Trump campaign’s manager believes that this is a reasonable premise to ground his arguments is far more troubling than the plagiarism itself could ever be.  Where plagiarism could be a single speechwriter’s poor judgment, the campaign manager’s considered response reflects far more entrenched attitudes - attitudes that we’ve seen repeatedly from Trump’s campaign.

If we curtail the details and niceties, the entire Trump campaign’s hidden premise is this: Trump &co are definitely smart, so any facts that contradict them must be wrong.  This is Trump Logic, a system in which you start with the assumption that you’re infallible, ignore established facts, and watch the “limits to your achievements” disappear.  Hence Trump’s well-known tendency to double down on patently false statements, whether it’s his claim that thousands of New Jersey muslims celebrated the 9/11 attacks in the streets, or that there is no drought in California, or that President Obama’s birth certificate is a fraud. 

And the scariest part about Trump’s anti-fact tendency is that it cannot be corrected - because what can you possibly say against the premise that facts are irrelevant?  False conclusions can be criticized and revised.  But false premises that are assumed as self-evident can’t even be discussed.  Trump Logic combines a megolomaniacal foundational premise with Moore’s structural move to build a solipsistic world of incontrovertible, logically consistent anti-facts. 

Which is all well and good for Trump.  But the rest of us, unprotected by a cocoon of inherited wealth and inventive lawyers, live in a world of facts.  And it’s becoming increasingly clear that the facts we have to live with are going to get extremely ugly if, in a country that depends on the reasonable choices of its electorate and their representatives to function, we decide that Trump Logic is what’s going to make America great again.