The Art of the Hoax
October 27, 2026
Two of President Trump’s most commonly used words are “deal” and “hoax.” A best-seller The Art of the Deal written in 1987 describes his business philosophy and tactics in great detail. On retrospect these forty years later, a parallel book that one might call The Art of the Hoax would be even more revealing about what makes the man tick.
He has labeled an awful lot of things a hoax, all of whose narratives share a position that he opposes and that he is deeply committed to discrediting and replacing with an alternative truth of his making. Examples of what he sometimes instead calls fake news include
- The outcome of the 2020 election,
- The continuing reliability of U.S. election results and votes cast by mail-in ballot,
- Climate change and the assertion that human behavior has played a key role in that process,
- Development of non-fossil fuel sources is something to be encouraged by the government,
- The risk, cause, and best remedies against the 2020 pandemic,
- Allegations that Russia tried to influence past elections and efforts to investigate such mischief,
- A view that immigration played a central role in defining America’s uniqueness and that benefits of immigration far outweigh any collateral damage. In the president’s telling, most of the foreigners trying to enter America were criminals where they lived before.
- The contention that America has reaped enormous advantages from security and economic alliances that are justifiable even in cases where the U.S. has borne disproportionate financial costs,
- Russia, until proven otherwise, is not a country the United States can, or ought to, trust,
- Artificial intelligence potentially offers enormous societal benefits, but a risk exists of even greater dangers — even ones that are arguably existential. Those hypotheticals strongly argue in favor of significant government regulation of AI development.
- The intent of America’s founding architects was a government with equally shared powers as dictated in the U.S. constitution, and that checks on the power of the executive branch will enhance, not prevent, the process of becoming a more perfect union.
If the president were to engage in a high-stakes poker game, his clearest tell would be the invocation of the H-word , as in hoax. In a consistent number of instances that form a predictable pattern, he cries hoax when he in fact is himself perpetrating a deception as the term is defined to be “a deliberate plan, trick or falsehood created to deceive individuals or the public into believing something false is true.” Put differently, the accusation is usually onto something correct, but rather than being the victim, it is he who is trying to fabricate a different fact or truth. Strangely enough, such a tactic has proven effective in bending human beings’ sense of reality if and only if one keeps repeating the replacement narrative without conveying the slightest hint of irony or prevarication. Propaganda repeated over-and-over has enormous emotional appeal.
The inside-outside-upside-down switcheroo involved in President Trump’s hoax accusations extends to other assertions that do not involve the H-word. The claim, for instance, that he is the smartest and most adept president America has ever had is made without supporting proof. His SAT scores and course grades are locked away in the strictly confidential folder, but what is known is that among the last sixteen men to call the White House home, only Reagan was not exposed to any post-graduate education, and Mr. Trump rather uniquely was elected president without any prior experience in the public sector. The skills needed for success in the public and private sectors are rather different, and people in very top positions from the private sector have often found equal distinction in public sector much more elusive. Donald Regan, who went from CEO of Merrill Lynch to Treasury Secretary in 1981-5, was but one of several examples.
In a case of the pot calling the kettle black, it’s hard to square the president’s crusade against Ivy League schools for allowing antisemitism to fester with his own demeaning public ambush of Ukraine President Zelenskyy before TV cameras in February 2025.
The huge offensive on deportations and effort to redefine birthright citizenship are another inherently contradictory priority. Trump’s own grandfather reportedly came to America initially in order to escape military service in Germany, and when he tried returning to live in Europe was in fact himself deported for having broken German law. That background seemingly fits the grey area of immigrants being hunted down by ICE. By prohibiting naturalized citizens becoming president, the U.S. constitution is quite clear about preventing anyone not born into American citizenship from gaining significant influence over U.S. government policy. Yet, that is exactly what South African-born Elon Musk has been permitted to achieve, both by his critical influence over U.S. military assistance for Ukraine and by personally spending enough as a donor of political campaigns to affect the balance in next term’s U.S. Congress.
Too many other fact-or-fiction misrepresentations exist to list each, but one last one kind of sums it all. The current president repeatedly has labeled some Democratic politicians as communists and enemies of the people while defending extreme right-of-center folk as patriots . Communism embraces government ownership and authority over property. While the politicians being labeled communist do not seek doing that, the present federal administration has itself made a number of deals that give the U.S. government shares in private corporations, both domiciled in the United States and others with operations abroad. Not by coincidence, there has been seemingly more overt corruption in this second term than seen before during the past 100 years, and one can only guess how much other illicit activity might be happening out of sight. One by-product of communist governments and other authoritarian regimes is their propensity toward rampant corruption. Exposing that swamp is what got Navalny killed.
Copyright, Larry Greenberg. All rights reserved.
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