Trump And Authenticity Fallacy

He doesn't pretend to be anything but a liar and a shit. That doesn't make him less of a liar and a shit.

The last word on Donald Trump’s appeal to the working class.

The pithiest observation about President Donald Trump’s appeal to the working class was a cartoon by Paul Noth that the New Yorker published three months before the 2016 election. A couple dozen sheep are grazing on a hillside, in the midst of which is placed a billboard showing a wolf in business attire and the campaign slogan, I AM GOING TO EAT YOU. Most of the sheep ignore the billboard, but two are reading it, one of whom says to the other: “He tells it like it is.”

The cartoon went viral after the election, and this October a color variation on it will grace the cover of Noth’s first cartoon collection, titled I Am Going To Eat You … And Other Awkward Truths, published by Union Square & Co. I’ve posted the book cover above rather than the original cartoon so Conde Nast doesn’t sue me for copyright infringement; I figure book covers are fair game because who could possibly object to free publicity for a book?

Noth’s point was that Trump’s supporters value him for his authenticity, which is different from truthfulness. Trump is a pathological liar, and anybody who pays the slightest attention to him knows that. But unlike, say, Richard Nixon, Trump doesn’t pretend to be someone he isn’t; his faults (dishonesty, hatefulness, greed, opportunism, vulgarity, and so on) are right up front and part of the brand. Trump embodies “an emerging late-modern version of the authenticity ethic,” the sociologist Ori Schwartz observed in 2023, that attracts the white working class but also many others.

Rather than presenting his commitment to moral values, ideals, and allegedly-universal rules, Trump [uses] anti-PC rhetoric to expose and criticize the symbolic self-interests of others who speak on behalf of these values, rules, and ideals to claim superiority…. Authenticity as a principle of worth guiding moral evaluation and argumentation is revealed as a sacred in denial.

The best thing you can say about this phenomenon is that it doesn’t seem to transfer very well to other political candidates. There are lots of MAGA types in Congress and in state houses, but they are valued for their fidelity to Trump, not for their own glaringly bad characters. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis learned that the hard way when he challenged Trump in the 2024 primaries.

My latest New Republic piece notes Trump’s appeal to working class voters and what’s starting to look like its long-overdue diminishment, and expresses the hope that working people will finally take notice of how much violence Trump is doing to labor rights at the National Labor Relations Board. You can read it here.