How to Debate Someone Who Lies
Dr.
Friedman, a contributing opinion writer, is a professor of clinical psychiatry
and the director of the psychopharmacology clinic at the Weill Cornell Medical
College.
·
Sept. 25, 2020
When Joe Biden debates President Trump
on Tuesday, he will have to figure out how to parry with an opponent who
habitually lies and doesn’t play by the rules.
As a psychiatrist, I’d like to offer
Mr. Biden some advice: Don’t waste your time fact-checking the president. If
you attempt to counter every falsehood or distortion that Mr. Trump serves up,
you will cede control of the debate. And, by trying to correct him, you will
paradoxically strengthen the misinformation rather than undermine it. (Research shows that
trying to correct a falsehood with truth can backfire by reinforcing the
original lie. )
Instead, Mr. Biden should use more
powerful weapons that will put Mr. Trump on the defensive — and also tell the
audience that the president is a dishonest narrator.
The first weapon
maybe the most effective: humor and ridicule. A derisive joke can defuse tense
and outrageous situations. In 2007, for example, protesters dressed as clowns
confronted a “white power” march in Charlotte, N.C., holding signs that read “wife
power” and throwing white flour in the air. It made the white
nationalists look ridiculous and avoided a violent confrontation, which would
have served the interests of the racists.
Now, imagine a different kind of
high-stakes situation — the presidential debate. Mr. Trump, faced with a
pandemic and an economic downturn, tells Americans what a great job he’s done.
In response, Mr. Biden should smile and say with a bit of laugh: “And just
where have you been living? South Korea? Or Fiji? You cannot be in the United
States — except maybe on the golf course. We’ve got about 4 percent of the
world’s population and 21 percent of all Covid deaths and the highest
unemployment since the Great Depression! You must be living on another planet!”
The retort mocks the president as weak
and unaccomplished, which will rattle him. He is apparently so fearful of being
the target of a joke that — unlike any president before him — he has skipped the
last three roasts at the White House Correspondents Dinner.
Ridicule could also neutralize one of
Mr. Trump’s favorite racist tropes: that America is being overtaken by violent
thugs. So what should Mr. Biden do when the president starts in? He should say
something like, “This is like the bad joke about the arsonist who shows up at
the bonfire and started posing as a fireman! The guy who calls himself a stable
genius seems to have forgotten that he’s been president during all this
violence and that he’s been the instigator in chief with his racist rhetoric.
The country’s biggest bully thinks he can fool you by playing sheriff.”
To see why humor could be so effective
in dealing with Mr. Trump, you have to understand why he lies. People don’t
tell the truth for many reasons, but the president’s lies generally fall into
two categories. The first are boastful and self-aggrandizing claims, such as
“Only I can fix it. ” This swagger betrays a fragile self-esteem, and while
outlandish and amusing, the lies are typically harmless.
The second type of
lie aims to deceive others in pursuit of a specific goal. For example, we now
know, from a taped interview with Bob Woodward, that Mr. Trump knew in February
that the coronavirus was deadly and transmissible by air, but he lied to the
public, playing down its severity and discouraging the use of masks — a
calculated deception that cost untold lives.
This kind of lie is emblematic of
individuals with antisocial traits who have a deficit in moral conscience. But
if they also have strong narcissistic traits, they are exquisitely sensitive to
criticism and especially to ridicule. Derisive humor threatens to expose them
for the loser they secretly believe they are.
Some of the president’s lies are not
served by humor; Mr. Biden will have to confront them head-on, like the
president’s disastrous handling of the pandemic. In this case, the best
strategy would be to say: “The fact is that more than 200,000 American have
died — even if the president falsely suggests that the number is
lower. But let’s focus on the grim truth: More than 200,000 of our
loved ones died from coronavirus, many because of the president’s deception.”
The cognitive scientist George Lakoff,
who studies propaganda,
calls this a “truth sandwich” — a lie gets sandwiched between true statements.
Research shows it effectively corrects a falsehood, because people tend to
remember the beginning and end of a statement, rather than what’s in the
middle.
Mr. Trump’s resistance to masks is also
a target for a derisive truth sandwich: “Wearing a mask is one of the most
effective ways to prevent the spread of coronavirus. But you sure wouldn’t know
it from the president, who has run around in public without one and mocks people like
me who wear them. Is it vanity or that he just doesn’t believe in science? I
don’t know, but the science is undisputed: wearing masks saves lives.”
Mr. Biden will have another advantage
during the debate: President Trump will not have a live audience to excite him
and satisfy his insatiable need for approval and attention, which means he will
be even more vulnerable to a takedown. True, no one will be there to laugh at
Mr. Biden’s jokes, but it doesn’t matter because the goal is serious: to expose
the truth and unnerve Mr. Trump by getting under his skin.
Richard A. Friedman is a professor of clinical psychiatry and
the director of the psychopharmacology clinic at the Weill Cornell Medical
College, and a contributing opinion writer.