The Arbogast Fallacy
An Alternative Explanation for "Sanewashing"
by TIM KREIDER
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.
I’m always fascinated 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? Why would he attack Iran for no clear reason, with no clear plan? They affect to be stumped by this perverse, stubborn, self-sabotaging behavior, or else leave the question of his motives and intentions eloquently blank.
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 comprehend or 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 the rictus of 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.
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.
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.
More:
https://open.substack.com/pub/timkreider/p/the-arbogast-fallacy?r=2j4ob&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email
