Liars and Believers

It’s the day before the trial resumes, and although I’d planned on writing about television shows (watch this space!) I find there’s something else I have to say first.

“The Jinx Part 2,” chronicles what happened after millionaire Robert Durst, taking to himself on a mic he didn’t know was “hot,” accidentally confessed to “killing them all”—his first wife, his best friend, and his neighbor (who he also dismembered.) Putting to one side (for the moment) ongoing cable news commentary on the “hush money” trial of Donald Trump, it’s the creepiest series on television right now—not because of the killings themselves, but because of Durst’s apparently unflinching faith that, despite all the evidence—including his own filmed “hot mic” confession and bizarre admissions on the stand—he can bamboozle his way out of a guilty verdict. Or at least, into a special prison full of conveniences for “old, sick people.”

Is he deluded or what? Testifying In a wheelchair, seeming so papery frail he might die at any moment, Durst’s voice is shaky and barely audible; later the same night, on a telephone call with his second wife it’s noticeably louder and stronger. Does he not know the call is being recorded? Does he just not care? Is it all just some kind of weird game to him? It seems like the latter, when at one point, the prosecutor asked if he killed his friend Susan. “NO.” “But if you had, you’d lie about it, is that correct?” “CORRECT.”

WTF is going on here? What world is Durst living in? It’s not easy to name it, but it’s not unlike the same world Donald Trump was living in when, at a recent rally, he gave a shout-out to the “late, great” Hannibal Lecter, referring to the (fictional) psychopath as a “wonderful man.” The only difference is that Durst was found guilty, while Trump has managed, so far, to get away with his delusions and deceptions: 71 percent of Republicans describe him as “honest and trustworthy.” And he may bamboozle his way not just out of jail but into a second term as President of the United States.

Trump, like Durst, is both a narcissist and a con-man. And increasingly, like Durst, he seems to be going off whatever rails kept him minimally balanced over the years. I sometimes fantasize that, like Durst and like the psychotic stepfather of the movie of the same name (“Wait, who am I here?”) he will dramatically decompose before our eyes and become a puddle of incoherency. But then I realize that basically he already has, and it doesn’t seem to matter at bit to a large portion of the population. Or to the various institutions that we at one time imagined would protect us from an authoritarian madmen having the nuclear codes.

Despite numerous books and articles, we’re still dazed and confused by the Trump phenomenon. How he got elected in the first place is one thing—that’s something we can diagnose and deconstruct (my own view is that it wouldn’t have happened had he not been carried over the finish line by Hillary-hate, media malpractice, James Comey, and—as we now know from the “hush money”revelations—criminal deception of the voting public.) But how he continues to bamboozle is something else. The mainstream media remarks at the capitulation of the GOP, as well as Trump’s thousands of devoted followers, in a kind of amazement. “How could this happen?” “The guy is a pathological, ego-driven liar. Don’t these people see it?” “What will it take to wake them up?” And then they offer their explanations: cynical power-grabbing, fear of Trumpian displeasure, mass hysteria, the fragility of our institutions, brainwashing, disorientation etc. etc. People on Facebook quote from William Butler Yeats on the center not holding. George Stephenopolis has described us as too numb to react to the constant outrages anymore. Like people in a bombed out city who become habituated to death. This week, Charlie Sykes, in The Atlantic, likened the state we’re in to vertigo, less like numbness than

….something like airsickness, which results when we experience a disconnect between our senses—a nausea-inducing conflict between what we know and what we see. Motion sickness is caused by a discrepancy between what the inner ear detects and what the eye sees. The effect can be vertiginous—so the way people avoid being nauseated is by trying to ignore the dissonance.

We’ve been led to believe that things work in a certain way, that there are mores and norms. We thought our world was right side up, but it now feels as if it’s been turned upside down. Words don’t mean what we think they do. Outrage is followed not by accountability, but by adulation. Standards shift, flicker, vanish. Nothing is stable.

This is pretty fancy existential language. And certainly, some people may experience our current situation as nausea-inducing. I suspect they may be more used to a “right side up” world than those for whom it’s always been on a tilt. Personally, I don’t feel dizzy. I feel angry. I want to scream. I want to bash a hole in the wall. Fuck the “flickering standards.” Our standards are quite stable; they’re just grounded in groupthink, headline “news,” and winning PR. A “dissonance” between what we “know” and what we “see”? If only! Knowledge doesn’t seem to even figure into our lives much anymore. Vertigo? I wish that our understanding and representation of the Israel/Gaza war (for example) would allow itself some vertigo instead of historically untethered simplicities. The mainstream media, although they regard and congratulate themselves as our heroic epistemological watchdogs, in fact bark and jump up, not on “truth” or even “facts” but on packaging the moment with words, images, chyrons—that pump up some events and “disappear” others. Events that are headlined, dramatized, and repeated slyly segue into the category of believability while those that are deemed less gripping slip into the purgatory of inattention. And if the chosen Big Story is ultimately proved groundless (as frequently happens) it’s easy to bury the retractions on page 10 (television reporters often just ignore their misreports.)

In a previous stack, I offered an example from our current real-life trial.

After Michael Cohen’s cross-examination on Thursday, after a repetitious, boring morning, all the commentators were delighted to finally have a “stunning moment” to report. And report. And report. And chew over how “severely damaging” it was. They had trouble containing their excitement. (I’ve italicized and bolded to make this point clear.)

CNN Live Event/Special

Soon: Trump Defense Resumes Cross-Examination Of Michael Cohen; Stunning Moment With Michael Cohen In Trump Hush Money Trial. Aired 1:30-2p ET

Aired May 16, 2024 - 13:30   ET

ANDERSON COOPER, CNN HOST: This one, Todd Blanche clearly saved this to right before the lunch break. [At first it seemed]…you know, like a ridiculous story, some 14-year-old is sending him nasty text messages and he's going to call Keith Schiller about it. And then you realize, you look at -- he showed the phone logs, that the prosecutor it had shown, and it's the phone call that -- that Michael Cohen had previously talked about.

I think it is severely damaging to Michael Cohen's testimony.

Kara, you are there. What did you think?
We were sitting -- I was sitting in the opposite aisle. So I haven't been able to talk to you. But I found it just so exciting. It was - whatever -- whoever you believe, whatever side, it was just a remarkable moment in court.

KARA SCANNELL, CNN CORRESPONDENT: It truly was. Because it was really just kind of this building crescendo with more of that more mundane questioning of just trying to see if Cohen did lie about multiple things, including whether he wanted a pardon or whether he was accepting responsibility for his guilty plea.

But then it built to that moment where Todd Blanche methodically went through the phone calls, the text messages. And as you were saying, kind of put Michael Cohen in the box and then shut the lid.

Because it was -- and Blanche added to it by being himself more theatrical about it. He's pacing, he's rubbing his head, he's swailling his arms. His voice is rising as he is being incredulous.
Saying to Cohen, are you -- do really expect me to believe that in that one-minute, 36-second phone call you talk to Keith Schiller about the harassing text messages and phone calls, and also to Donald Trump about Stormy Daniels where you told him it was resolved… And Cohen, while he maintained his composure, he certainly didn't look like he had a lot of confidence in his answers there. And then he just built and built and built by showing those text messages, showing the call logs.

And then, at the end, where he left the jury with it after that big moment, he then said, you know, so I don't want what you think he remember. I want -- the jury needs to know what you know and what you definitely remember.

And then he left it hanging in the air, did -- was this true for all of the phone calls that Cohen recalled in 2016?

…..

We're going to take a short break, really just a remarkable close of this session in court.

After a full day and a half of this we finally got more judicious analysis of that “stunning moment” (that involved one phone call out of several in which Cohen discussed the upcoming payment to Stormy and that the prosecution is likely to “clean up” with ease in a redirect or a closing.) But of course, by then, most viewers had been led to believe that Michael Cohen’s credibility was “severely damaged”—just because the defense had gotten loud and woken everyone up.

---

Reflections of a more personal nature:

The trial is about to resume tomorrow. My husband Edward is sure that the jury will find Trump guilty. I have serious doubts. We go back and forth with each other in this current version of the same argument we’ve been having since the American voters lost their minds in 2016. The argument has taken a lot of different forms, but I’ll boil it down for you: Is there hope for us or isn’t there? He thinks there is—that the truth will out, the wicked will get their punishment, and though we once were blind, will some day see. He learned that hymn, I never did. But once—can’t say exactly when I lost my faith, it’s been brewing for quite a while—I had more stock in all those now near-defunct values (truth, fact, reason, yada yada) than even he did. Perhaps than most people have.

I went into philosophy in part because it seemed like such a cool thing for a girl to do, but more deeply because my childhood was full of lies. Little, mundane but haunting ones: you think you’re going to a party but end up with some doctor putting an oxygen mask over your face, or they don’t tell you they’re dragging you to school to get a polio shot. And also really, really huge lies that make you doubt all official accounts of things: I was 18 years old before I was told that my mother was once married to my father’s first wife’s brother (yes, brother and sister; Flatbush was a small, Jewish world in those days,) that they ran away (to the wilds of Newark) together and had my older sister “out of wedlock.” I grew up with no trust in anything but my own efforts to cut through bullshit, to expose every cover-up, rip away every mask, excavate any truth that there was to be found in life. And philosophy seemed to be a discipline that would reward my skill/disorder (take your pick.)

My husband also found escape and relief in his choice of specialization. But not in order to find a clean, cool place to be. He comes from emotionally reserved, upper-class, very anglo stock. Lots of lawyers, who travelled to be educated in Great Britain. A building on the Cornell campus named “Boardman Hall,” after his great-grandfather. And their own house, non-ostentatious but stately, on a steep Ithaca hill, always smelled of firewood and Thanksgiving dinner. No garlic, onions, or cigar smoke. Everyone moved and talked slowly and deliberately. “You have such lovely, young hands,” his ever-polite, secretly anti-semitic father told me when we first met. You get the picture.

Growing up, Edward dated daughters of Cornell professors and did the expected things. But for whatever reasons—who knows why some people grow seamlessly into their communities, while others feel choked?—there was something in him that kept wandering away to other cultures and their art and music and literature. First it was France and French. But the French were a little too cold and stylish for him. He yearned for warmth. And when he discovered Russian literature and music, that was it. Everything missing from or denied in how he’d grown up: passion, depth, tears, talk. And Edward would also say: God. God wasn’t in the spare Presbyterian churches or monotonous hymns. For Edward, God was in Scriabin and Shostakovich, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky.

The thing about Russian literature: There are a few purely good heroes, but mostly everyone starts out flawed or incomplete or oblivious, and in the course of the narrative, has defining moments (those moments could be moral awakenings, they could be spiritual epiphanies, they could be some stark confrontation with a reality that’s been denied—as, for example in Tolstoy’s “The Death of Ivan Ilych”) that turn their lives around. I’m not going to wander off into literary examples now. My point here is: Edward, who recreates himself every time he dazzles a classroom of students with his perfect Russian accent (Russians have taken him for a native, despite his all-American looks), and who abandoned the slender, country-club debs for zaftig, argumentative Jewish girls, deeply believes that people can change, can learn. And no matter how much evidence there is to the contrary, he never seems to lose faith in that possibility. I love this about him, and it also gives me opportunities to try out counter-arguments. But lately, I’ve come to lose faith even in the value of arguing, and I wind up listless and irritated: “I hope you’re right,” I say, in order to end the discussion.

It’s hard for me to believe in some moment when “the truth” will hatch out of our current, unfortunately non-fictional morass of lies, evasions, and cons. And perhaps I’m especially skeptical because I once was such a believer in the grounding power of thinking. Not “Thought.” Just ordinary thinking things through—past the illusions and the performances and the self-deceptions and the lies. That belief seems pretty naive to me now.

For a few years after 2016, I still genuinely believed that things that could change the course we seemed to be on. I grew up, along with others of my generation, with actual memories of Watergate and, even if we were too young to view it ourselves, a narrative about the bringing-down of Josephy McCarthy that shaped our imaginations about the possibilities—even inevitability—that the arc of the moral universe did indeed bend toward justice. There were grim realities, but there also were dramatic moments that changed everything:

"Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness.… Senator, may we not drop this? We know he belonged to the Lawyer's Guild ... Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator; you've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?” 

The 2016 election was a devastating blow. But for a long time afterward, we held out hope for our own Joseph Welch or Watergate moment, waited for the bend in the arc which would send the edifice of authoritarianism crashing down—or expose a President’s corruption, as we had witnessed during the televised final six days of the House Judicial Committee’s deliberations over Nixon’s impeachment. When the Committee brought three articles of impeachment against Nixon and the House voted to have the entire impeachment trial televised, Nixon resigned in a prime-time television address, and we cheered.

At one point, we thought Robert Mueller might provide our Joseph Welch moment. We waited and waited, and enjoyed a clever video in which Mr. Prosecutor Mueller, like some modern-day Elliot Ness, collared all the crooks from Flynn to Trump. What a relic it seems like now!

Our pulses quickened and our hearts gladdened when we heard The Report was about to be released. But Mueller, bless him, thought history was still written with a quill pen. He actually expected Americans to read 400 pages of dense prose and do the right thing by it. He didn’t “get” television at all. But disastrously, Donald Trump and his Attorney General Bill Barr, following the Roger Ailes playbook, did. Trump and Barr understood that the phrase “No Collusion,” said often enough before a viewing audience, could easily defeat evidence and argument. 

Watching Bill Barr replace Mueller’s painstakingly prepared, factually impeccable report with televised lies was a turning point for those of us who had harbored the fantasy of a politically disruptive report delivered by a hero who, in a devastating moment of televised honesty and courage, would save us from our increasingly corrupt “normalcy.” The indictments, with their courageous investigators and prosecutors—provided a brief moment of hope, which my husband celebrated and I remained skeptical about. But one by one, the lying liars, from state legislatures to the “Supreme” Court (I’ll never say it anymore without scare quotes) harassed and stalled and tortured the constitution to prevent the trials—all but one—from happening.

As the trial resumes, I know the political machinery for bending the arc in the opposite direction of truth and justice is still whirring away. And as for the ability of twelve individuals to see through it, to think through it, to—just in this one instance, please!—to reverse that arc? it’s hard for me to be hopeful. I can already see the dust stirred up by the ridiculous idea that “if he lied then, you can mistrust anything he says now” and the essential but tricky distinction between “reasonable doubt” and “beyond a shadow of a doubt.” I don’t imagine that Katy Tur and Chris Jansing are up to clarifying it for viewers. I worry that over the long week-end, the jurists are, at some point, going to talk with their relatives or turn on the television. And I’m anxious about the two lawyers on the jury; judging by much of the “expert” legal commentary on MSNBC, they have their own weeds to get lost in at the expense of common sense.

“Jaded” is way too pale a term for how I feel. “Despairing”? I’m still not quite there. “Loss of faith” about does it.

But I’m glad I live with Edward, who can scream as loudly as I do at the television set, but who still believes. And who was willing, last night, to watch three anxiety-vanquishing seasons of “Schitt’s Creek” with me. My daughter stayed through a few episodes, too (unusual for her, to watch anything with us) and we all marveled at how funny it still is.

I would absolutely trust this jury:

Or this one: