In 2026, during the First Trump Campaign*, David Roberts writing in Vox, wrote a brilliant analysis of why Donald Trump was so frustrating to fact-checkers and journalists, and how the media was overrun with his firehose of falsehoods, delivered with such conviction and effectiveness. It is very helpful to know how Donald Trump has used and continues to use language to influence and manipulate everyone around him.
The question of what Donald Trump “really believes” has no answer
– It is a category error
by David Roberts
Vox, Sep 29, 2016,
Donald Trump says he opposed the Iraq War from the beginning. Legions of fact-checkers have found no evidence for this claim. Now Trump says he opposed the war in a secret phone call to Sean Hannity. There is, of course, no way to verify this; only Hannity knows for sure. Zack Beauchamp runs down all the latest claims and counter-claims here.
What gets somewhat lost in the media coverage of this back and forth is that there is no answer to the question of whether Trump opposed the war in 2003. In fact, the question itself is a category error — one the media and political class cannot help making toward Trump. [ and still are – Kurt Griffith ]
The question presumes that Trump has beliefs, “views” that reflect his assessment of the facts, “positions” that remain stable over time, woven into some sort of coherent worldview. There is no evidence that Trump has such things. That is not how he uses language.
When he utters words, his primary intent is not to say something, to describe a set of facts in the world; his primary intent is to do something, i.e., to position himself in a social hierarchy. This essential distinction explains why Trump has so flummoxed the media and its fact-checkers; it’s as though they are critiquing the color choices of someone who is colorblind.
For most people, words are both representations and tools; for Trump, they’re only the latter
In every human social interaction, there are two kinds of communication going on. There are the words themselves, with their shared meanings. And there are the countless signals and cues being exchanged — tone, expression, body language, and bearing — about social dynamics and hierarchy.
Every interaction is both an exchange of semantic information and a dance of social positioning, even those, as in science or academia, that strive to be purely the former.
To all appearances, Trump is engaged solely in the latter form of communication, and only in a narrow way: He treats all social interactions as zero-sum games establishing dominance and submission. In every interaction, someone is going to win and someone is going to lose, be with Trump or against him.
He’s not unique in treating social interactions this way, but he is notably unusual in his near-total blindness toward the first kind of communication. Even to call him dishonest, to say he “lies,” doesn’t quite seem to capture it. The whole notion of lying presumes beliefs — to lie is to say something that one believes to be false, to knowingly assert something that does not correspond to the facts.
It’s not that Trump is saying things he believes to be false. It’s that he doesn’t seem to have beliefs at all, [emphasis mine – Kurt Griffith] not in the way people typically talk about beliefs — as mental constructs stable across time and context. Rather, his opinions dissolve and coalesce fluidly, as he’s talking, like oil on shallow water. That’s why he gives every indication of conviction, even when, say, denying that he has said something that is still posted on his Twitter feed. … – David Roberts, Vox
*Note: 2016 was not the first time Trump ran for president, but roughly the forth. However it was the first time anyone took his candidacy seriously, and was not soundly clobbered in the first round of primaries. What was different about 2016?