The Arbogast Fallacy

An Alternative Explanation for "Sanewashing"

I’ve identified a certain fallacy endemic among journalists covering Donald Trump that I’m calling the Arbogast Fallacy, after a character in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho.

In Psycho [and if you haven’t seen Psycho, you should see Psycho, and if you don’t know the plot of Psycho, you should stop reading this right now], the characters all act as though they think they’re in a film noir—and Psycho is considered the end of the noir cycle by some film scholars—trying to suss out one another’s motives, unravel their schemes, solve the mystery. When Janet Leigh’s character, Marion Crane, disappears, her sister hires a detective named Arbogast (Martin Balsam), who assumes she’s absconded with the cash she embezzled to elope with her fiancee; later he starts to suspect that this squirrelly kid Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) is in cahoots with her, or maybe even offed her to take the money himself; after Arbogast goes missing, too, the sister figures he must’ve found her and blackmailed her for a cut of the loot.

None of them can begin to imagine what’s actually happening, because they have no way of knowing that they’re not in a noir at all; they’re in the first modern horror film, whose villain kills for no rational reason at all. A psychologist gives a convoluted and dodgy psychosexual explanation in the movie’s denouement that’s belied by the film’s last shot, of the murderer’s grinning face dissolving into a death’s head. He wasn’t some venal schemer, or tortured by repressed Oedipal urges; he’s what horror fans now call a slasher—a monster, an incarnation of Death.

This same sort of twist is the basic engine of most jokes and riddles: the setup (“What looks like half a piece of cheese?”) challenges you to solve a puzzle; the solution (“The other half!”) is so obvious and stupid that it makes you feel stupid for having tried to overthink some clever answer.

And this, essentially, is the fallacy that so many editorialists, pundits, and talking heads fall prey to in discussing the monster who’s now President. I’m always interested to read or hear political commentators discussing Trump’s contradictory statements and erratic behavior; there’s always something left conspicuously unsaid in their analyses. Officially, they treat as an insoluble mystery the question of why he acts in ways that seem self-defeating—forfeiting the political center, alienating his electorate, undermining his own party’s agenda and their chances in the midterms. Why won’t he just stick to his talking points and focus on “affordability”? Why did he abruptly cancel a photo-op that would give his party a desperately needed boost in the polls? Why would he attack Iran for no apparent reason, with no apparent plan? They affect to be stumped by his perverse, stubborn, self-sabotaging behavior, or leave the question of his motives and intentions eloquently blank.

If you’re writing an op-ed or political analysis, or appearing as a guest on a podcast or discussion panel, you feel a professional obligation to try to come up with a novel insight, a “hot take”—ideally, something smarter than whatever all the other smart writers and speakers are saying that day. Something other than the obvious. The problem is, the object of so much of that labored ideation, Donald Trump, is obvious. He is not a complex figure of Nixonian contradictions. There are no depths to plumb; his biographers are going to have to pad out their books with a lot of background information and photo sections. He does not engage in subtle Machiavellian maneuvering; the only moves he knows are the playground rudiments: brag. Deny. Bully. Bribe. There’s nothing there for a smart person to figure out; they’re writing think pieces about a guy who doesn’t. His operating principles, the only rules you need to remember to understand absolutely everything he does, are simple:

1. He is a very stupid person who has never read or learned or ever been really interested in anything that didn’t directly benefit him, and (not unrelated)

2. he genuinely doesn’t give a shit about anything other than himself—not his voters or his party or his allies in congress or his “friends”/business associates or his own family. I have no doubt he would sell his daughter to a Saudi prince if he could negotiate a good price.

He also does not have what you could call a hidden agenda. His goals are as crude and basic as a flatworm’s. He wants:

a.) to make as much money as possible in any way he can

b.) have everyone pay attention to him all the time

and—increasingly a priority the last few years—

c.) stay out of prison.¹

(His conspicuous cognitive decline complicates all of the above, but it doesn’t alter the fundamental principles at work.)

The fallacy’s derivation notwithstanding, I’m not arguing that Donald Trump is psychotic; he’s not that interesting. He has the conscience of a toddler and the ethics of a tick but he isn’t mentally ill. He’s just a soft, spoiled, weak, mean rich kid who no one’s ever said no to and no one’s ever loved. He inhabits a sterile inner landscape of panicky, fragile vanity and unappeasable, suppurating resentment.

So every day we see people who got advanced degrees in poly sci or economics from Ivy League universities or made names for themselves as political analysts or consultants for previous Presidential administrations struggling to explain his erratic actions and the conflicting signals emerging from the White House, talking around the insoluble mystery of his motives. But the whole mystery evaporates once you’ve accepted the above principles.

Cartoon by B. Kliban, from “Tiny Footprints,” 1978.

Examples:

Q: Why would Donald Trump have attacked Iran without reckoning on the scenario, considered by all previous administrations in their contingency planning, that Iran would close the Strait of Hormuz? How could he have been unprepared for this inevitability? A: Because he didn’t know about that. Again, see principle #1: he’s never read a report or paid attention to a briefing and he fired everyone who knew what they were talking about because they wouldn’t have done what he said. He and his very manly “Secretary of War” just figured if no one had ever attacked Iran before, it was ‘cause they just weren’t tough enough. Their whole strategy was: if we drop a lot of bombs on them they’ll realize how, like, mighty we are, and give up! When this didn’t happen, they were out of ideas. Trump has been trying his usual tactic of making the war be over by saying it is, but it hasn’t seemed to work so far. So he now alternates between sporadically attacking Iran some more to see if it maybe works this time and once again declaring the whole thing a big bore, we won anyway, it’s all over, everyone so everyone stop talking about it already.

Q: Why won’t he just stick to the freaking script and talk about “affordability,” the issue that voters keep loudly and repeatedly insisting is most important to them? Instead he digresses to brag about the tacky vanity projects he’s squandering their taxes on or goes on tangential rants about “Communism,” a scare tactic that must galvanize any surviving members of the John Birch Society. Well because remember operating principle #2: he doesn’t give a shit. He doesn’t give a shit about the primaries or the midterms, except as blunt instruments of reward and punishment, to dispense favors or carry out vendettas. He personally never needs to worry about getting elected again; all he has to worry about now is a.) making as much money off this whole President scam as he can while still (don’t forget!—very important) c.) staying out of jail.

Part 2 of this question: why would Donald Trump willfully thwart a potential photo op for his party, who are not just moribund but odorously rotting in the polls and desperately need to show their constituents something—anything—they’ve done for people earning less than a billion dollars a year, when they were just about to sign an affordable housing bill? He cancelled it at the last minute, saying he wouldn’t sign the bill until Congress passed his stillborn “SAVE America Act” (like most Trump coinages, a perfect Orwellian contranym, for a plan to end representative democracy in America)? If we avoid succumbing to the Arbogast Fallacy, this is not a hard question. The election bill is Trump’s main priority in life, superseding even his colossal gilded ballroom/bunker, because he needs to ensure that only Republicans win any future elections. Not because he actually cares whether any individual Republicans win—see principle #2—but in furtherance of goal c.): staying out of jail. He knows very well that if Democrats win the midterms he will spend the remaining two years of his Presidency sitting in boring, humiliating congressional hearings and investigations and courtrooms, and quite possibly go to jail (objective #3!!!) and he is more than willing to undermine his own party to prevent this.

The Republican Party remains loyal to Trump out of fear—fear of getting primaried by some Trump flunky, fear of assassination by his slavering base—but Trump has no reciprocal loyalty to it. The Republican party is dead, whether it knows it or not; Trump’s fascist party is just wearing its flayed skin in mockery of its victim. Trump’s true political party is Opportunist; he’s historically switched affiliations, donated to Democrats, hobnobbed with Clintons. He would’ve used whichever party was more convenient as a host for his parasitic ambitions, but the Democratic base didn’t have the easily reached levers of racism, xenophobia and misogyny to motivate them, or an electoral bloc conditioned by fundamentalist indoctrination to accept self-evident untruths as gospel and vote in fascistic lockstep.

His administration’s and his party’s agenda derive directly from his own, which is, at bottom, not based on any ideology but deeply irrational, regressive and infantile: a geriatric panic in the face of senescence and death. They want to turn back the clock, make it be 1950 again: bring back the factories, make oil and coal king, ban the Communist sun and wind, and put the dames and the coloreds back in their place. They want to be rich straight white guys driving around in gas-guzzling cars smoking cigars and hitting their wives and fucking hot underage chicks without caring what a bunch of uptight biddies have to say about it. He, and they, are also not averse to taking the rest of the world with them when they go, like ancient despots who have all their possessions and slaves immolated or entombed along with them: hence their willful, perverse wrecking of the planet, clinging defiantly to fossil fuels even though renewables are now cheaper, drilling in endangered species’ habitats, trashing international alliances, gutting funding for science and education.

“Sanewashing” is what critics call the journalistic tendency to try to describe and explain Trump in the language of conventional politics, presuming that it’s a media conspiracy to normalize his pathology and gaslight us all into thinking we’re overreacting. There may be some truth to this, but I think the explanation is more complicated; people who have spent their careers covering politics simply don’t have a vocabulary for what’s happening now; they’re like noir detectives in a slasher film. There’s no real precedent for someone who wields more power than any other individual in human history simply having no idea what he’s doing, or behaving with such naked, shameless self-interest. They can’t not report on what the President said or did that day; but it’s too terrifying, unimaginable, to acknowledge that the guy with access to the nuclear codes knows much less about geopolitics than your fourth-grader, or that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is way lower on his to-do list than building that bigass arch. Two days ago, after Trump dismissed the Iranian leadership, whom he’d earlier called “smart, strong people” as “scum,” I got to listen to a White House correspondent halfheartedly float the notion that the abrupt contradiction might’ve been a bargaining tactic, struggling to avoid the conclusion that nothing the President of the United States says really means anything much at all.

People go to such convoluted lengths to avoid this elegant explanation not only because they’re hobbled by erudition; they’re also blinkered by their own sanity and humanity. You know that apocryphal test question to identify psychopathy, about a woman who meets a man she’s attracted to at her mother’s funeral, but she doesn’t get his number, so she murders her sister? By psychopathic logic, this is a reasonable gambit in hopes of seeing the guy again. Although this isn’t an actual clinical test, it does illustrate both Trump’s motives and reasoning as well as normal people’s difficulty in grasping them. Trump’s strategy seems nonsensical only if you assume that he factors the effect of his decisions on anyone else into his calculations.

It seems scarcely credible that someone would, say—just to pose a ludircously implausible scenario—start a war with a major power at no provocation, forfeiting thousands of lives, driving up oil prices and destabilizing the whole world order, just to distract people from a personal scandal. The moral calculus seems insanely imbalanced; it’s like solving the trolley problem by diverting the train to run over forty orphans because there’s a Kit-Kat bar lying on the other branch of the tracks. But of course Donald Trump would do that: why would he not? He wants a Kit-Kat.

This is hard to internalize if you were decently brought up or have normal empathetic responses, but it makes complete sense if you accept what’s evident in Trump’s every action and statement: that his loyalties end at the border of his own sagging skin. At this point he’s completely indifferent to the outcome in Iran; the whole subject bores him, because that war has been, from his perspective, a total victory: when was the last time you saw a headline about the Epstein Files?

Everybody on all sides of the political spectrum thinks the “mainstream media” is biased because it declines to parrot their own opinions back at them: conservatives think the “liberal media” is biased because it won’t confirm the delusional reality their propaganda outlets have curated for them; progressives think the “corporate media” is biased because it won’t just come out and say that Trump is a fascist and an imbecile—even though it’s that same media’s reportage that’s led them to those conclusions. (Just as it’s their coverage that’s allowed me to come to my own conclusions about Trump.) I understand that it’s not journalists’ place to editorialize; they can’t just call the President an illiterate or a narcissist or a dictator. So perhaps their only way of saying it is to talk or write all the way around it, constructing a chalk outline of facts that leaves a negative space at the center of their stories whose shape is instantly recognizable.

But I think the time is overdue that it was said. The Arbogast Fallacy isn’t just exasperating; it’s dangerous. Because refusing to name someone’s motives means not being able to imagine their potential. The willful ignorance implicit in this recurring question, Why would he possibly do that? carries with it the obdurate assumption: Surely he wouldn’t do that. Following the psychopathic logic of Donald Trump to its reductio ad eschaton leads us to scenarios that are best contemplated alone, late at night, over a glass of strong spirits. We already know that he cannot accept losing under any circumstances; he throws tantrums and insists he won and complains that it’s not fair and accuses the other side of cheating and basically behaves like the kind of crybaby you’d never let play kickball with you again. We know for a fact that he would not stop at sedition or insurrection, that he’d incite a riot and sic a violent mob on Congress, in an attempt to overturn a legitimate election he lost, because he already did. What would he do if he felt a Democratic congress were about to take away all of his power and status and riches—or his freedom? What if he were faced with the possibility of spending the rest of his life in federal prison? He could always flee to a cushy gilded exile in Qatar or Russia, but Trump has said, and demonstrated many times, that he’s a “fighter.” What would that fight involve—a last-ditch, bloddy-knuckled fight for his survival? Can you seriously envision Donald Trump ever saying, about anything: “No, that’s going too far”? Maybe an easier question to consider is: what wouldn’t he do?

Anthony Perkins as Norman Bates in Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960)

1. This last goal his frequently complicated by the first and second, since, inconveniently, in order to fulfill goal a.), he needs to commit dozens of crimes a day, so what with b.) everyone paying attention to him all the time, he is—jeopardizing goal c.)—liable to get caught. He clumsily tries to cover up the crimes by reflexively lying about them in an obvious, shameless way, which is fine when he’s talking to his rube supporters, or even the press, who can’t really do anything about it, but is evidently some whole big thing when you’re testifying under oath.