Arendt saw Nazism and Communism as endeavoring to fashion history into a science, something that acts according to universal laws and can therefore be predicted. A totalitarian leader, she writes, styles himself as the fulfillment of historical destiny and therefore its oracle. She cites Hitler’s announcement to the Reichstag in January 1939: “I want today once again to make a prophecy,” he said. “In case the Jewish financiers . . . succeed once more in hurling the peoples into a world war, the result will be . . . the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.” What Hitler means, according to Arendt, is: “I intend to make war and I intend to kill the Jews of Europe.” Totalitarianism voids the distinction between a prophecy and a declaration of intent. As Arendt puts it, once a totalitarian movement has seized power, “all debate about the truth or falsity of a totalitarian dictator’s prediction is as weird as arguing with a potential murderer about whether his future victim is dead or alive.” Just as the murderer can kill his victim to substantiate his claim, a government with total control can, in theory, ensure the accuracy of its predictions.
But total control is a chimera—a prediction about human affairs can only be infallible in a world expunged of all human agency—so its pursuit necessarily culminates in both outward aggression and internal terror. The organization of a totalitarian regime—its concentric circles of power, its bureaucratic systems, its elevated police force, its plans for world conquest—is designed to create “a society whose members act and react according to the rules of a fictitious world.” For adherents of the totalitarian movement, its lies grow impossible to challenge, “as real and untouchable an element in their lives as the rules of arithmetic”—and even the leaders “are convinced that they must follow consistently the fiction and the rules of the fictitious world which were laid down during their struggle for power.” According to Arendt, Hitler felt compelled to play along with his predictions, following conspiracies to their inevitable conclusions, often against reason and even self-interest; he was not content to lie without reorganizing the actual world accordingly.
To accuse Trump of anything so sophisticated is to misread his lies altogether. From the start, Trump’s lies were incidental and reactive, unconstrained by the need for coherence or the pressure to position himself as the culmination of historical trends. Though he retweeted QAnon-linked accounts, he did not explicitly endorse the conspiracy, which he could have harnessed to achieve the kind of “lying world of consistency” Arendt outlines. He invented facts as he needed them, flooding the field with misinformation. He tossed off a lie, and by the time the media had scrambled to fact-check him, he had already moved on to the next one. For the most part, his supporters were undeterred when his lies were unveiled, because they understood he was saying whatever was advantageous, not speaking as an absolute authority. In the end, Trump’s lies were less grand theory than self-aggrandizement—corporate bluster intended to artificially boost his own stock. He tended to inflate the numbers: how much money he was worth, how many people had attended his inauguration, how many votes he had received.