Trump, Fable-Spinner
Trump's supporters know they are being lied to, and they love him for it.
Trump’s return to the presidency has brought back a signature feature of his politics, colorful, obvious lies.
In a raucous speech before Congress last week, Trump repeated falsehoods he had been telling for weeks about discovering “hundreds of billions in fraud” in government spending and that millions of people over the age of 150 were collecting social security. (DOGE has cut 19.8 billion in spending, but it has offered little to no evidence of fraud. And in reality, several thousand, not million, deceased people were likely collecting social security.)
Elon Musk’s accounts of his activities at DOGE have been riddled with related (pro-DOGE) falsehoods and misinformation, some sloppy mistakes, others fabricated by alt-right internet personalities. (Musk also alleged widespread government fraud but produced no proof, claimed eight billion is savings when he meant eight million, and posted a “wall of receipts” riddled with inflated accounting errors.)
A similar pattern appeared at the end of the last Trump administration in the form of Trump’s “election fraud” narrative. Back then, few of Trump’s allies were willing to occupy his self-serving alternative view of reality.
But this time, things are different. Musk, as Trump’s right-hand man seems to have copied the president’s unique way of communicating, superimposing a fictional set of facts over real ones, then acting as if the imagined world was true, like a mime opening doors and windows that aren’t there.
It sure would be nice if Musk were rooting out fraud and corruption. But a second look shows he is often making up tales of wrongdoing and congratulating himself for finding them. (For example, our last podcast episode was about how Musk drew his allegations that USAid was part of an “evil” cabal from fabrications from alt-right white nationalist social media personalities.)
Many of Musk’s narratives (that millions of dollars in condoms were sent to Gaza, that widespread corruption was uncovered at USAID) are then repeated by Trump, and the two occupy an extended universe of Trump-Musk fan fiction.
Whether Trump and Musk believe what they’re saying or cynically generating misinformation is hard to tell (though it’s likely somewhere in between).
Cutting government spending doesn’t require you to make up stories about insider corruption and fraud. Ending the war in Ukraine doesn’t require you to pretend as if Ukraine “started the war” when it was invaded by Russia.
So, how does it benefit Trump (and Musk) to superimpose a fictional world over the real one and act as if that fictional world is true?
Why are they doing it?
In the past, the left considered Trump’s tall tales a liability. They were so obvious, after all, wouldn’t people see through them?
For example, during a debate with Kamala Harris in the summer, Trump told his now infamous story about immigrants eating cats and dogs.
Afterwards, New York Times commentator David French wrote how the debate was a win for Harris. She had "baited" Trump "and he fell for it... he responded with a barrage of conspiracy theories and misinformation that culminated in a bizarre rant about immigrants and pets in Ohio." John Stewart mocked Trump on The Daily Show with the same interpretation.
Perhaps, they were right, and Trump ultimately won the presidency (again) despite his habit of constantly telling absurd stories. Maybe these new ridiculous tales about condoms to Gaza and USAID being a “viper’s nest” of fraud won’t benefit them.
But what if the opposite was true?
We might get a clearer picture if we ask: how does lying and telling outlandish stories work so well for Trump? So well in fact, that Elon Musk began mirroring it?
How could spouting not just obvious, but ridiculous falsehoods, be a winning strategy in politics?
QAnon, the Helper Lie
After I wrote my book on the origins of far-right misinformation campaigns like QAnon, I often went to far-right rallies to talk to people about their opinions on internet conspiracy theories.
When I asked Trump supporters about their belief in QAnon during these rallies, I expected to find deranged people whose sense of reality had been eroded by social media addiction.
And many times, I did. Occasionally, I encountered the inverse. As I traced the QAnon conspiracy theory to its origins (a set of trolls on 4chan), I encountered hardened, cynical people, who knew QAnon was not true but felt it served their purposes to spread the canard of Hillary Clinton swapping children in the basement of a pizza parlor.
But I was most surprised to encounter a third group of people, people in the middle of these two extremes who made up the majority of QAnon supporters.
They believed in QAnon in a way I hadn't anticipated— as a fable, a compressed, portable way to relate their beliefs. The truth of the story was irrelevant to them, or at least not the point.
The tale of a vampiric political class making backroom deals and sucking the life out of the things they loved the most (represented in the characters of the children, who were variously harvested for organs or molested), expressed their truth.
These people believed they were getting a raw deal from politicians. They didn't know how. But they felt they were being lied to. So why not lie to themselves? "Fight fire with fire" as Trump often says when justifying his own misrepresentations.
Why not make up their own lies to counteract the vague and slippery lies of the political class that were so often clad in thousands of smaller truths or presented as unbiased facts in the form of practical economic realities and statistics?
The Trump supporters I spoke to couldn't win on that playing field and knew it. Where else to go but into the world of fables and stories? A place where truth was representational, but not abstract. Specific actions were performed by heroes and villains in particular places.
George Washington was so honest that when he was a boy and chopped down a cherry tree, he was forced to respond to his father, "I cannot tell a lie."
How do you fact check it?
You can of course, but it doesn't matter. The father, the cherry tree, the boy hero, they are organized to tell a story about a more complex thing, Washington's character and conduct in office as president.
This more complex truth would lose clarity and immediacy if converted into another form.
Lying to Us is Lying for Us
Trump did not make up QAnon. But he often uses the same rhetorical device.
Trump doesn’t explain policies in detail—he tells stories. Instead of addressing the complexity of an issue, he flattens it into a fable. The fog of statistics, demographics, and legal complexities solidifies into something graspable: a character performing an action.
His abortion stance wasn’t a discussion of legal precedent or reproductive rights. It was a story: in West Virginia, a baby is born, and the Democratic governor personally decides whether to execute it. His approach to foreign policy? He sent the Taliban a picture of their leader’s house, and that solved everything. Immigration? Migrants are eating your pets.
This storytelling strategy works because it distills broad anxieties into a simple, vivid image. It’s the same trick that made QAnon resonate—not because people literally believed in Clinton’s child-trafficking ring, but because it symbolized their deeper fears about a corrupt elite. And it’s why Elon Musk has begun to mimic Trump’s fable-driven style, spreading stories of vast government fraud that vanish under scrutiny but linger in the public imagination.
On social media, where attention is fleeting, simple and lurid tales always outcompete complexity. Even Kamala Harris, debating Trump on abortion, offered a detailed legal argument—Trump simply told a fable. Which one do people remember?
Our current Trump tall tales are about 150-year-old people cashing security checks and spy novelesque stories about Musk uncovering fraud deep within the bowels of the bureaucracy. They also transform something complex (reorganizing the federal government) into a simple morality play with heroes and villains (a fraudster, pretending to be 150 years old, cashing the check, the protagonist, Musk, uncovering the conspiracy). Ultimately, the stories explain an abstract idea, “the government is so incompetent it’s giving money away to scammers.”
As with QAnon, Trump supporters don't hear Trump's lies as deceiving them, they hear them as expressing their viewpoint— advocating for them.
Trump’s supporters often know the stories aren’t strictly “true.” They’re cudgels, easy to pick up and swing to beat the other side.
That’s why when the left fact checks Trump’s lies and imagines a great day of reckoning when reality will re-assert itself, it never comes. And instead, counter-intuitively, Trump’s supporters greet each new absurd lie with celebration.
Recently, the New York Times commentator Ezra Klein suggested Trump’s lies “trap” allies like J.D. Vance in an alternative universe. There is likely some truth to this explanation. But the actions of Vance and Musk show something else— they’ve grasped how effective Trump’s fable strategy is and adopted it as their own.
Recall after Trump’s “cats and dogs” comment, J.D. Vance took to X/Twitter to celebrate the lie with supporters.
“Keep the cat memes flowing.” He wrote, implying he understood the truth of the story wasn’t the point, the messaging was. The pets meme delivered their point in a single viral idea. Or as he explained it, "If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that's what I'm gonna' do."
Now that we receive an infinite stream of information, messages are locked in a Darwinian competition for attention. The simplest messages, and the most lurid and colorful, tend to survive. It’s no coincidence that as Musk spreads falsehoods about his work at DOGE he has been posting nonstop on X (formerly Twitter), pulling narratives about what he’s doing from alt-right figures who specialize in spreading viral misinformation.
On social media, complex and nuanced ideas die. Simple messages that get a rise out of people live.
How to Fix it
Trump’s messaging succeeds not because it’s fabricated, but because it simplifies and taps into real anxieties: Immigration has spiraled out of control, inequality (and so economic insecurity) has risen to extreme levels, the government has grown larger and more inefficient than ever.
The Democrats’ messaging (delving with their managerial expertise into the details of statistics, legal theory, and bureaucratic machinery) reflects their flawed manner of governing (micro-adjusting a system that needs holistic reform as it produces unprecedented inequality). As people become frustrated with the dysfunction, an ever-growing angry rejection of facts and expertise (and the retreat into myths and fables) feels almost inevitable.
Avoiding the "tweaking the broken" blind-spot is the central managerial philosophy of Elon Musk, who describes how when building rockets or cars the easiest mistake to make (and the most important one to avoid) is perfecting a part you don’t need— not looking at the big picture, because you’re adjusting the details of something unnecessary.
And likewise, Trump and Musk’s approach to governing (chopping bluntly, hacking at the system indiscriminately) mirrors their messaging (ignoring details and oversimplifying until they’re lying and shadow boxing imagined conspiracies.)
Winning isn’t just about messaging— it’s about action. If the left can address rising inequality and government dysfunction, they can craft simple, truthful narratives that resonate as powerfully as Trump’s fables.
If the left wants to counter Trump’s fables, it can’t just fact-check—it has to tell better stories. Until then, Trump and Musk will keep writing the script, whether it’s true or not.