How Trump's regime has become captive to its own lies
In The Power of the Powerless, Vaclav Havel described a system in which lies are not incidental, but foundational. A system that does not merely tolerate falsehood, but requires it, reproduces it, lives within it: “Because the regime is captive to its own lies, it must falsify everything.”
What Havel diagnosed in late-stage communism was not simply repression, but something more insidious: a political order in which language is severed from reality, and truth replaced by performance.
That diagnosis now feels uncomfortably contemporary.
Lying, for US President Donald Trump, is no longer merely a personal trait. It has become a governing method.
During his first term, Trump made more than 30,000 false or misleading claims - an average of over 20 a day, rising to nearly 40 a day in his final year.
This was not an occasional distortion. It was industrial, systematic, relentless. Fact-checkers were forced to invent new categories to describe it: “Bottomless Pinocchio” for claims repeated so often they could no longer be mistaken for error. Some claims were repeated dozens, even hundreds of times.
And that was just his first term. What we are witnessing now is not a departure from that pattern, but its escalation. The scale has expanded, the stakes deepened - and the consequences have become global.
They are now embedded in war.
Cascade of falsehoods
Yet even here, language is the first casualty. Trump has been careful in refusing to call this what it is. Not a war, but an “operation”, a “limited mission”, even an “excursion”.
The reality tells a different story: thousands of troops deployed, carrier groups repositioned, air assets mobilised, and special forces inserted.
What was presented as a contained action has expanded into a widening conflict, stretching across multiple theatres and threatening to engulf the region and beyond.
It was meant to last hours. Hours became days, and days became weeks. There is still no end in sight.
It is the marketplace elevated to government and empire. Everything is negotiable and transactional. Even truth becomes a bargaining chip
After the 12-day war last June, Trump declared that Iran’s nuclear programme had been “completely obliterated”. Months later, he invoked that same programme to justify further military action. A programme, apparently, that is both destroyed and intact; gone and still urgent.
Then came the cascade.
Trump claimed that the US had destroyed the Iranian navy, even as tensions in the Gulf intensified and American forces were pushed into a more defensive posture in contested waters. He insisted that the majority of Iran’s missile capabilities had been wiped out, while waves of missiles hit Tel Aviv, demonstrating Tehran’s active and adaptive capabilities.
Last weekend, Trump threatened to obliterate Iran’s power stations within 48 hours, sending shockwaves through markets and governments alike.
Then, almost seamlessly, he pivoted, citing “good and productive” negotiations. He claimed to be engaged in advanced talks with the Iranian leadership, only to be met with public denials from the parliamentary speaker, his deputy and the foreign minister.
And yet, Trump continued - a pattern that has been reinforced by a constant drumbeat of declared victory. Trump incessantly claims the war has been won, even as fighting continues and escalation deepens.
Attack on truth
Victory is not reached. It is announced, each time overtaken by events on the ground.
There is no collapsed leadership, no defeated state. Instead, the US is facing an adversary that continues to function, strike, and endure.
This is where George Orwell becomes unavoidable. In such systems, language is inverted: war becomes peace, destruction becomes stability.
But Trump’s method goes further. His relentless invocation of “fake news”, echoed by Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth, is not simply an attack on the media. It is an attack on the very possibility of truth.
The objective is disorientation: to blur the boundary between fact and fiction so completely that the audience no longer trusts either. Fact begins to appear as fiction. Fiction, repeated with confidence, takes on the weight of fact. The audience no longer asks what is true; only what is asserted.
At times, the performance slips into parody. At a rally, Trump suggested that Iran’s leadership wanted him as supreme leader, before theatrically rejecting the offer: “No thank you, I don’t want it.”
Claims that would be dismissed in fiction are delivered from the highest office on earth and applauded - and that is the point. When falsehood becomes systematic, absurdity becomes normal.
Trump is the purest expression of a mercantile logic unleashed upon power. He governs as he traded: deals without limits, leverage without principle, greed without restraint.
This is not statecraft. It is the marketplace elevated to government and empire. Everything is negotiable and transactional. Even truth becomes a bargaining chip.
The clown doubles down
Trump is not merely a businessman. He is a businessman who believes too much in his own charm. He is not self-made, but self-convinced; his inheritance mistaken for genius, his privilege rebranded as prowess.
From this emerges a theatrical entitlement: a man oscillating between egomania and grievance, between grandiosity and paranoia, convinced not only that he is right, but that reality itself must bend to his assertion of it.
He does not describe reality. He performs it. His statements are not anchored in fact; they are designed to impress, to overwhelm, to dazzle.
Consistency does not matter. Effect does. If reality resists, he escalates. If facts contradict him, he replaces them. If the world doubts him, he doubles down - because he believes repetition can substitute for truth.
Alongside him stands Pete Hegseth, whose rhetoric adds a darker register, with biblical overtones and talk of a civilisational struggle or crusade, in which conflict is framed as destiny.
This is thuggery cloaked in theology, and the result is not strength. It is spectacle: a superpower that speaks in absolutes, acts in contradictions, and expects the world to accept both.
But the world no longer does. Allies hesitate. Rivals calculate. In moments of crisis, even those long accustomed to following Washington’s lead step back: France resists. Germany hesitates. Even the United Kingdom, under Prime Minister Keir Starmer, offers only limited, defensive support.
The pattern is familiar. During the Suez Crisis in 1956, former British Prime Minister Anthony Eden discovered that power collapses not when it is defeated, but when it is no longer believed.
That is the shift now underway. The US is no longer taken as seriously as it once was. It is watched, and quietly dismissed - not as a stable hegemon, but as something volatile. A spectacle. A performance. A farce.
And at its centre, a clown. A dangerous clown at the helm of a superpower.
This is not ordinary comedy. This is dark comedy.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
This article was sourced from Middle East Eye.
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