When Truth Is Beside the Point: Understanding Bald-Faced Bullshit in Politics

In 2018, Donald Trump recounted a conversation he had with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau about trade between the United States and Canada. Trudeau, Trump said, insisted that Canada had no trade deficit with the United States, to which Trump replied: “I said wrong, Justin, you do.” Then he added something striking: “I didn’t even know. I just said, you’re wrong.”

If we take Trump at his word, he made the statement without knowing whether it was true and without caring whether it was. That raises an interesting question: what kind of speech act is this? It doesn’t seem to be a straightforward lie. To lie, one has to believe that what one says is false. But Trump explicitly says he didn’t know whether the claim was true or false.

Philosophers have a term for statements like this. They call them bullshit. And in recent political discourse, we increasingly encounter a particularly striking form of it: bald-faced bullshit.

Bullshit and Bald-Faced Bullshit

The modern philosophical discussion of bullshit was famously sparked by Harry Frankfurt’s short book On Bullshit. Frankfurt argued that bullshit is fundamentally different from lying.

A liar cares about the truth—they just want to conceal it. The liar knows what is true and deliberately says something false. The bullshitter, by contrast, is indifferent to the truth. Whether their statement is true or false simply doesn’t matter to them. Their goal might be to impress an audience, dominate a conversation, or create a certain impression, but conveying accurate information is not their concern.

Imagine someone at a party confidently citing impressive-sounding climate statistics without having any idea whether they are reliable. The aim may be to appear knowledgeable rather than to convey true information. That is a classic case of bullshit.

In Frankfurt’s original picture, however, the bullshitter usually tries to hide this indifference. They want the audience to believe that they care about the truth. But many contemporary political statements are different. In recent years, we have seen political claims that seem to be not only indifferent to the truth, but are openly so. Speakers sometimes make statements that are wildly implausible, easily debunked, or quickly contradicted by their own later remarks. Yet they show no sign of embarrassment when these problems are pointed out.

Philosophers refer to this phenomenon as bald-faced bullshit: assertions made without regard for the truth in which the speaker does not even try to conceal that indifference. 

Why Use Bald-Faced Bullshit?

Bald-faced bullshit can serve several purposes in the political realm.

Evasion

One obvious function is evasion. Politicians are often expected to say something in response to difficult questions even when they have no interest in revealing information. In such situations, bald-faced bullshit can fill the conversational space without committing the speaker to anything. Instead of saying “I don’t know” or “I cannot comment,” the speaker says something even if it lacks any evidential basis.

Controlling Attention

Bald-faced bullshit can also be used to generate attention due to its blatant violation of conversational norms. If used to make outrageous or implausible claims, bald-faced bullshit is guaranteed to provoke reactions, criticism, and fact-checking. Even people who reject the statement may feel compelled to respond to it. In today’s media environment, attention is a scarce resource. Statements that generate controversy can dominate the news cycle and push other issues out of public view.

Demonstrating Power

Bald-faced bullshit can also serve as a display of power. Openly violating communicative norms can signal that the speaker is not constrained by the usual rules. Others—journalists, opponents, or subordinates—may still feel bound by those norms. This asymmetry can be politically useful. If one side adheres to epistemic standards that the other side does not adhere to, the latter enjoys greater freedom in shaping the conversation. In some cases, leaders even force their allies to defend obvious falsehoods, thereby demonstrating loyalty and reinforcing hierarchical relationships. As long as there are no effective sanctions, norm violations are likely to increase the onlookers’ perception of the norm violator as powerful.

Flooding the Information Environment

Beyond these individual effects, bald-faced bullshit can also operate at a structural level. Political strategist Steve Bannon once described his communication strategy as “flood the zone with shit.” The idea is simple: overwhelming the informational environment with so many misleading or irrelevant claims that it becomes difficult to sort truth from noise. In a world where information is abundant but attention is limited, this strategy can be remarkably effective. Journalists and citizens simply do not have the time or cognitive resources to verify every claim.

Eroding the Norms of Public Discourse

Perhaps the most troubling effect concerns the erosion of communicative norms. Social norms depend on shared expectations. People follow them partly because they expect others to do the same and because violations are usually sanctioned. But when powerful figures repeatedly violate a norm without consequences, expectations begin to shift. If politicians openly disregard truth without being punished for it, audiences may gradually stop expecting them to follow the norms of assertion at all. Over time, this can transform the character of political discourse. Statements that look like assertions begin to function less as attempts to describe reality and more as performances aimed at signaling allegiance, provoking reactions, or demonstrating power.

These developments matter because democratic societies rely on public debate and informed deliberation. Citizens need reasonably reliable information in order to evaluate policies, judge political leaders, and participate in collective decision-making. For that reason, democratic deliberation depends on communicative norms that encourage truthful speech.

Bald-faced bullshit undermines those norms directly. By openly disregarding truth, it weakens the shared expectations that sustain truth-oriented discourse. If enough speakers behave this way—and if the behavior goes largely unsanctioned—the norms themselves may erode. When that happens, the informational environment becomes increasingly difficult to navigate. Political communication shifts away from exchanging information and toward performance, signaling, and strategic manipulation. This shift does not merely affect individual conversations; it can reshape the conditions under which democratic deliberation takes place.

Recognizing the Strategy

Understanding bald-faced bullshit helps make sense of a puzzling feature of contemporary politics. Some statements that are obviously false may still be politically effective because they attract attention, demonstrate power, overwhelm the informational space, or weaken the norms of public discourse. Recognizing these dynamics is thus an important step in diagnosing the vulnerabilities of democratic communication.

Truthful speech is not merely a moral ideal in politics. It is part of the epistemic infrastructure that allows democratic societies to deliberate and make collective decisions. When truth stops being relevant to political speech, democratic deliberation itself is put at risk.

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This is a highly condensed version of our latest paper “Deeper Into Populist and Authoritarian Bald-Faced Bullshit”.