Truthful Hyperbole, Honest Bullshit
Ancient Rhetoric Explains Why Trump’s Lies Work So Well
It should come as no surprise that our real-estate agent-turned-reality-TV-star President massages the truth to get what he wants. In “his” 1987 book Art of the Deal, ghostwritten by Tony Schwartz, he laid out a theory of truthful hyperbole: “I play to people’s fantasies … People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular. I call it truthful hyperbole. It’s an innocent form of exaggeration.” What is more surprising, however, is how well this overt deception works for Trump rhetorically.
Gallup polls show 70% of Republicans/Leaners call him “honest and trustworthy,” and his supporters still echo the familiar refrain, “he tells it like it is,” regardless of his PolitiFact ratings (~70% of the time, “Mostly False” or worse; compare to Obama’s 33%). Most of his “Pants on Fire” level lies are fueled by wild exaggerations.
So: truthful hyperbole, honest bullshit. If we want to make sense of these contradictions, we need to understand how and why hyperbole works so well for Trump. Thankfully, ancient rhetorical theory can help. Let’s start with Aristotle.
In his handbook on rhetoric, Aristotle laid out three modes of persuasion: ethos, an appeal to character; pathos, to emotion; and logos, to reason. A good orator should be adept at each of these and able to wield all three in proportion in order to make the strongest argument. In this scheme, hyperbole (from the Greek hyper + ballô, “to throw beyond”) is a hyper-effective pathos-based appeal, but often comes at the cost of ethos and logos. As Aristotle wrote, hyperbole is “juvenile,” and angry people use it most. Hyperbole can communicate and incite emotion, but, being “vehement” or “violent,” it is bound to make a speaker less trustworthy.
Most ancient rhetorical teachers and handbooks followed Aristotle’s judgement. Quintilian, an expert of Roman rhetorical thinking, put it simply: there is no surer path to kakozêlia —“bad taste” or affectation in speaking, weakening one’s authority and rapport with their audience—than hyperbole. He warned that crowds would not take a hyperbolist seriously for long. Cicero, Rome’s premier rhetorician, likewise cautioned his students in his treatise on proper rhetoric, De oratore, that over-exaggeration is a rhetorical transgression, almost always counterproductive (in theory). If someone chooses to use hyperbole, they should do so sparingly and carefully so as not to lose their audience’s trust.
This framework should sound familiar. If you have been following the frenzy of essays and opinion pieces evaluating Trump’s rhetoric (as I have been, to the detriment of my health and sanity), you will have noticed a trend: article after article about how Trump’s hyperbole will surely backfire. Trump practically said it himself: “You can’t con people, at least not for long. If you don’t deliver the goods, people will eventually catch on.”
According to this logic, if someone exaggerates too freely or puffs up too many half-truths with hyperbole, eventually people will stop trusting them. Trump can’t just go on saying that Obama started ISIS, or that global warming was a Chinese hoax, or that he’s won many environmental awards, or that he polls better than any other republican in American history without repercussions! Right? Kakozêlia!
Well, maybe he can. Our expectations of consequences and repercussions have not panned out. We need a new framework to analyze hyperbole — or we need to look at an old one a bit differently.
I already mentioned Cicero’s rhetorical theory, probably to some raised eyebrows. That’s because anyone familiar with Cicero’s actual speeches — the work that made him Rome’s most eminent and enduring orator — knows him to be an exaggerator par excellence, a man who never hesitated to hyperbolize about his supreme goodness and his enemies’ superlative badness.
Take Cicero’s Second Philippic, perhaps his most famous composition. In 44–43 BCE, Cicero was concerned that Marcus Antonius (now “Marc Antony,” thanks to Shakespeare) aimed at tyranny, following in the footsteps of Julius Caesar. He wrote 14 speeches against the upstart, modeling them after the Greek orator Demosthenes’ speeches against Philip of Macedon (father to Alexander the Great). Throughout, he spared no chance at exaggeration: the second Philippic boasts 53 hyperboles (by my count) over the course of 47 OCT pages — and that number jumps to ~70 if you count each individual exaggeration embedded inside longer hyperbolic stories. Theory and practice don’t always align.
Most of Cicero’s hyperboles in the Second Philippic are superlative epithets used to introduce or develop characters. Those sympathetic to Cicero were without fail the “smartest,” “wisest,” or “most honorable of all men.” On the flipside, Cicero’s enemies, especially Antony, became epitomes of vice. Almost every time that Cicero said Antony’s name, he hurled another insult: stultissimus omnium Antonius, “the dumbest of all men, Antony”; amentissimus homo Antonius, “the most insane, Antony”; Antonius humanitatis expers, “Antony, lacking ‘humanitas’” and so on.
Bill Beck recently explored Trump’s pejorative Twitter epithets for Eidolon, contrasting them with the Homeric: where the bard’s universalize, Trump’s specify, reducing the world and its inhabitants to “essential categories.” With each epithet, Trump can distill a caricature of one of his political opponents into a short, memorable insult. His hyperbolic stories are condensed and perfected as epithets, and they become Twitter shorthand to disparage his opponents. When he hammers our brains again and again with these epithets, he creates what psychologists call “illusory truth” — which is what happens when sheer repetition overwhelms our brain’s ability to distinguish truth from lies. Hyperbole and repetition work together in both Ciceronian and Trumpist epithets to dominate a listener’s mind. When they are most effective, no matter what we may believe, “Hillary” always follows “Crooked,” and “Antonius” “amentissimus.”
But Cicero’s most impressive hyperbolic creations were not epithets. They were stories — complex composites of exaggeration and metaphor that mold real individuals into massive literary figures. Cicero built himself up: he reminded us, for instance, that he singlehandedly represented the safety of Rome against every enemy the Republic had seen in his lifetime. Every enemy, in fact, felt compelled to declare war against Cicero personally, as he was so aligned with the state in all things. And his consulship: he had acted so remarkably that every Roman senator thanked him for saving the state, and they all considered him their father. (See also the “Personal Superlatives” section of the Trump Twitter Archive. )
But Cicero saved the juiciest hyperbole to tear Antony down: once, Cicero’s Antony, who could drink as much as a gladiator could fight, got himself so wasted at a public assembly that he filled his lap and then entire tribunal with wine-stenched, chunky vomit. Later, to cap off his assault against Antony’s insatiable appetites (for money, booze, and deviant sex), Cicero compared the man to Charybdis, the mythical man-devouring beast of Homeric fame. But no, he corrected himself, Charybdis wasn’t enough: not even the Ocean, a city-guzzling, kingdom-swallowing mythical force could have consumed as much as Antony!
Certainly “Pants on Fire” material. But fact-checking is not applicable in Cicero’s case, just as it wasn’t when Trump said Obama founded ISIS. This type of hyperbole works completely outside the bounds of reality. It is more than emotional communication, more than pathos, because hyperbole muddies our distinction between the actual world — the expected domain of logos and ethos — and fabricated, hyperbolic worlds. Political hyperbole combines real people with literary creations. Cicero can then develop memorable personae for himself and his enemies, expressing some essential qualities about a character that he wants to stick, and he can communicate without serious regard to dis/honesty. Trump is preternaturally talented at these kinds of exaggerations.
As Salena Zito wrote for the Atlantic in 2016, we have to take Trump seriously, not literally. His supporters do not think about these statements on a scale of un/truth, and neither should we. These are rhetorically effective lies that do not backfire, because, as their listeners know, they aren’t meant to convey literal truth in the first place. Instead, literary creations weave reality into a new hyperbolic hybrid world, felt and understood rather than proved. To critique these kind of statements, we need to respect their power and try to deconstruct rather than “disprove” them — to pull apart and address the emotions and meanings they communicate outside the confines of facts.
Hannah Arendt wrote that attacking truth attacked “the ground on which we stand and the sky that stretches above us.” To adjust the metaphor slightly, hyperbole allows Trump to stretch new skies above us. It seems many people like the view.
But the success of a rhetorician is hard to assess. Cicero has been held up as the epitome of oratory for more than 2,000 years, and his literary creations — his hyperbolic Antony, for instance — still color our conception of the Roman world. That said, Cicero’s hyperbole eventually backfired: the Philippics so enraged Antony that he had Cicero murdered. The aspiring tyrant nailed the orator’s severed head and hands, the source of the loathed Philippics, to the rostra in the forum, or so the story goes. Not too much later, the Roman Republic that Cicero strove to defend existed in name alone. Still, two millennia later, Cicero’s hyperbole echoes in Latin classrooms across continents he never dreamed of. If Cicero is a successful orator, his victory must be a function of our reception.
Trump’s power will also be determined by reception. I am convinced that his hyperboles and the lies they fuel will not backfire or make him seem less honest to his supporters. These people find meaning and connect with him emotionally in the hyperbolic worlds he builds — not the world of Politifact.
But you and I are also Trump’s audience, and his success is also in our hands. To disarm each hyperbole, we ought to break down the feelings it communicates and tear apart the prejudices and judgements it encompasses rather than pointing out that it isn’t true — even if it feels like we are up against a hydra. Or, of course, we can show our rejection of Trump’s rhetoric and disempower him by voting.
Daniel Ruprecht received a B.A. from Stanford University, double-majoring in History and Classics. He is currently a Master’s student at the University of Arizona, where he is writing a thesis on experiences and representations of shame/guilt (aiskhūnē) in Menandrean New Comedy.
