The Founder of ‘Is’ Is
ENLARGE
What happens in Vegas . . . Photo: Getty Images
By
James Taranto
Aug. 15, 2016 1:38 p.m. ET
“Today @realDonaldTrump told another giant lie today—Obama founded ISIS. Yet, he drops such falsehoods so often that we don’t even notice.” So tweeted Michael McFaul late Wednesday.
Your humble columnist had been incommunicado for hours, as we were on a long flight and are too cheap to pay for airline wi-fi. The McFaul tweet was the first we’d heard of Trump’s “giant lie.” As we waited at baggage claim, we tweeted back: “I don’t think it’s reasonable to take that literally.”
The following afternoon, McFaul claimed vindication. Pointing to a Trump quote from an interview with radio host Hugh Hewitt, he tweeted: “so when given the chance to clarify, Trump doubled down on “founder of ISIS” claim. Reasonable?” The Trump-Hewitt quote:
Hewitt: Last night, you said the president was the founder of ISIS. I know what you meant. You meant that he created the vacuum, he lost the peace.Trump: No, I meant he’s the founder of ISIS. I do. He was the most valuable player. I give him the most valuable player award.
There’s much more to the Hewitt interview, and we’ll get to it below, but even this snippet suggests that Trump was not being literal. There’s a big difference between a founder and a most valuable player: Von Miller is not the founder of the Super Bowl. While we’re at it, we’ve never heard of an MVP award for terrorism, so that part is obviously figurative.
McFaul is a serious man, a Stanford political scientist who worked at the National Security Council as a special assistant to President Obama and served as ambassador to Russia in 2012-14. Lots of other serious people took Trump’s “founder” statement literally, or at least made a show of doing so. As CNNreported: “A day of furious—if somewhat puzzled—fact-checking followed. The reviews were unanimous. No, Obama was not the founder of ISIS.”
PolitiFact rated the statement “Pants on Fire!”:
Let us be clear: It is wildly inaccurate to say Obama or [Hillary] Clinton “co-founded” ISIS.Experts have repeatedly told us that the sources of ISIS are complex and interconnected.But Trump’s provocative comment glosses over all of that nuance.
Time.com observed:
Of course, Obama did not found ISIS and has actually led a campaign that has killed thousands of ISIS militants.Labeling any individual the sole founder of ISIS would probably be an oversimplification given the wide range of factors that contributed to its rise. But two figures—Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi—stand out as the most pivotal in the organization’s ascent to international infamy.
And Hillary Clinton’s campaign tweeted: “No, Barack Obama is not the founder of ISIS.”
Well. In April Mrs. Clinton told Business Insider: “The way Donald Trump talks about terrorism and his very insulting language towards Muslims is making him the ‘recruiting sergeant’ for ISIS.” No one fact-checked that statement; even the interviewer grasped that she was speaking figuratively and accordingly put scare quotes around “recruiting sergeant.”
Of course it’s possible that Mrs. Clinton was speaking figuratively and Trump was not. But a closer look at the Hewitt interview makes clear that was not the case. Picking up where we left off:
Trump: I give him the most valuable player award. I give her, too, by the way, Hillary Clinton.Hewitt: But he’s not sympathetic to them. He hates them. He’s trying to kill them.Trump: I don’t care. He was the founder. His, the way he got out of Iraq was that that was the founding of ISIS, OK? . . .Hewitt: I think I would say they created, they lost the peace. They created the Libyan vacuum, they created the vacuum into which ISIS came, but they didn’t create ISIS. That’s what I would say.Trump: Well, I disagree.Hewitt: All right, that’s OK.Trump: I mean, with his bad policies, that’s why ISIS came about.Hewitt: That’s—Trump: If he would have done things properly, you wouldn’t have had ISIS.Hewitt: That’s true.Trump: Therefore, he was the founder of ISIS.
So Trump stuck to (or “doubled down on”) the formulation “founder of ISIS,” while also spelling out that what he meant by that was precisely what Hewitt supposed.
To put it in technical terms, Trump committed a fallacy of equivocation. As the Texas State University Department of Philosophy website explains: “The fallacy of equivocation occurs when a key term or phrase in an argument is used in an ambiguous way, with one meaning in one portion of the argument and then another meaning in another portion of the argument.”
A classic example of the fallacy of equivocation is a riddle apocryphally attributed to Abraham Lincoln. How many legs does a dog have, Lincoln is supposed to have asked, if you consider its tail to be a leg? The correct answer is four. A tail is not a leg, whether you consider it one or not.
Trump is not the first politician to commit a fallacy of equivocation. The most memorable example in recent history is Bill Clinton, the founder of “is” is. When Mr. Clinton said, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky,” he meant it to be understood as a blanket denial that any hanky-panky had occurred. Such a denial would have been false. But at least in Mr. Clinton’s own mind, his denial was literally true, because he was defining “sexual relations” narrowly, as referring only to intercourse.
There’s an important difference between Mr. Clinton’s equivocation and Trump’s. Mr. Clinton’s purpose was deception: He did not go on to inform listeners of the things he and Monica Lewinsky had done; that was left to the painstaking investigative efforts of the independent counsel’s office. If he had—if he explained what he meant by “sexual relations”—it would have defeated his purpose.
Trump’s purpose, by contrast, was hyperbole. At least when pressed by Hewitt, he was happy to explain what he had in mind. Not only that, but he was transparent about his tactics:
Hewitt: And that’s, I’d just use different language to communicate it. . . .Trump: But they wouldn’t talk about your language, and they do talk about my language, right?Hewitt: Well, good point. Good point.
Not only do “they” talk about Trump’s language; in doing so, they reinforce his underlying message. Let’s return to those “fact checks.” PolitiFact:
Democrats often blame President George W. Bush for the creation of ISIS, because al-Qaida flourished after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.But you could also argue Obama’s decision to leave Iraq after 2011 contributed to the security vacuum that gave ISIS the chance to put down roots and regroup.
Time.com:
There’s an element of truth to [Trump’s] clarification. Some national security experts have said that pulling out of Iraq in 2011 left the country vastly unprepared and helped create an environment where ISIS could expand and thrive. But the real blunder, many experts say, was President George W. Bush’s decision to invade Iraq in the first place without any real plan to bring stability. Mistakes aside, calling any U.S. president the “founder of ISIS” is a grave misrepresentation.
CNN:
Under the guidance of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi [ISIS] has capitalized on a series of missteps by both the George W. Bush and Obama administrations—along with a civil war in Syria and Iraqi government failures—to create a new global terror state.
And this is from a Daily Beast piece, which we didn’t quote above because it wasn’t framed as a fact check:
Assume you’re running for president . . . and you wish to criticize the sitting commander in chief for being oblivious to, if not accidentally enabling, the rise of the world’s deadliest terrorist organization. What might you say to make your case?You might point out that Barack Obama’s wholehearted support of an Iranian satrap in the form of the former Iraqi prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki—a man Obama described on the White House lawn in 2011 as the elected leader of “a sovereign, self-reliant and democratic Iraq” and the “most inclusive government” in that nation’s history—was probably a bit of a bloomer in hindsight, and an avoidable one.Obama’s own vice president correctly assessed, not a year earlier when the administration backed the premier for re-election, that Maliki “hates the goddamn Sunnis” and that the goddamn Sunnis are the bellwether constituency determining the fortunes of Sunni jihadism in Mesopotamia as well as the necessary bulwark for destroying and discrediting it, as Obama has lately discovered to his own embarrassment.You might also point to the near-criminal indifference by the current White House to the slow-motion catastrophe that has unfolded in Syria. Many decent and “non-radicalized” Syrians initially saw the United States as a prospective savior from Assadist atrocities. Now many view it as an Assad accomplice, just as Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of the so-called Islamic State, has been saying for years.
Mission accomplished for Trump: His hyperbolic statement that “Obama was the founder of ISIS” prompted media figures hostile to him and sympathetic to Obama and Mrs. Clinton to spill a good deal of figurative ink acknowledging his real point, that the Obama administration’s missteps helped ISIS to grow. That they also faulted George W. Bush doesn’t hurt the case, since Trump says he opposes the Iraq war, in favor of which then-Sen. Clinton voted in 2002.
It was enough to drive Mediaite’s Tommy Christopher to despair:
On Friday, . . . even after Trump had given up the trick to the entire news media, they fell for it again. With some of the discussion turning toward Trump’s own 2007 comments that the US should “get out” of Iraq, and needing to cap off the week with a win, Trump tweeted that he was just being sarcastic when he called Obama the founder of ISIS. Like Imperial Stormtroopers looking for ’droids, the media commenced a dutiful flurry of panel hits and surrogate interviews devoted to Trump’s “walkback,” all of which once again contained the talking point in question posed as the reasonable thing Trump should have said. Since he sent it, Trump’s tweet has been reported forty times on MSNBC and CNN.
And yet. While Trump scored a masterful tactical victory—and, let us note, won an argument over policy—it could turn out that he’s making an important strategic error. Presidents typically maintain an air of seriousness, and voters may feel that Trump’s unconstrained use of sarcasm and hyperbole sets an unpresidential tone.
What happens in Vegas . . . Photo: Getty Images
By
James Taranto
Aug. 15, 2016 1:38 p.m. ET
“Today @realDonaldTrump told another giant lie today—Obama founded ISIS. Yet, he drops such falsehoods so often that we don’t even notice.” So tweeted Michael McFaul late Wednesday.
Your humble columnist had been incommunicado for hours, as we were on a long flight and are too cheap to pay for airline wi-fi. The McFaul tweet was the first we’d heard of Trump’s “giant lie.” As we waited at baggage claim, we tweeted back: “I don’t think it’s reasonable to take that literally.”
The following afternoon, McFaul claimed vindication. Pointing to a Trump quote from an interview with radio host Hugh Hewitt, he tweeted: “so when given the chance to clarify, Trump doubled down on “founder of ISIS” claim. Reasonable?” The Trump-Hewitt quote:
Hewitt: Last night, you said the president was the founder of ISIS. I know what you meant. You meant that he created the vacuum, he lost the peace.Trump: No, I meant he’s the founder of ISIS. I do. He was the most valuable player. I give him the most valuable player award.
There’s much more to the Hewitt interview, and we’ll get to it below, but even this snippet suggests that Trump was not being literal. There’s a big difference between a founder and a most valuable player: Von Miller is not the founder of the Super Bowl. While we’re at it, we’ve never heard of an MVP award for terrorism, so that part is obviously figurative.
McFaul is a serious man, a Stanford political scientist who worked at the National Security Council as a special assistant to President Obama and served as ambassador to Russia in 2012-14. Lots of other serious people took Trump’s “founder” statement literally, or at least made a show of doing so. As CNNreported: “A day of furious—if somewhat puzzled—fact-checking followed. The reviews were unanimous. No, Obama was not the founder of ISIS.”
PolitiFact rated the statement “Pants on Fire!”:
Let us be clear: It is wildly inaccurate to say Obama or [Hillary] Clinton “co-founded” ISIS.Experts have repeatedly told us that the sources of ISIS are complex and interconnected.But Trump’s provocative comment glosses over all of that nuance.
Time.com observed:
Of course, Obama did not found ISIS and has actually led a campaign that has killed thousands of ISIS militants.Labeling any individual the sole founder of ISIS would probably be an oversimplification given the wide range of factors that contributed to its rise. But two figures—Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi—stand out as the most pivotal in the organization’s ascent to international infamy.
And Hillary Clinton’s campaign tweeted: “No, Barack Obama is not the founder of ISIS.”
Well. In April Mrs. Clinton told Business Insider: “The way Donald Trump talks about terrorism and his very insulting language towards Muslims is making him the ‘recruiting sergeant’ for ISIS.” No one fact-checked that statement; even the interviewer grasped that she was speaking figuratively and accordingly put scare quotes around “recruiting sergeant.”
Of course it’s possible that Mrs. Clinton was speaking figuratively and Trump was not. But a closer look at the Hewitt interview makes clear that was not the case. Picking up where we left off:
Trump: I give him the most valuable player award. I give her, too, by the way, Hillary Clinton.Hewitt: But he’s not sympathetic to them. He hates them. He’s trying to kill them.Trump: I don’t care. He was the founder. His, the way he got out of Iraq was that that was the founding of ISIS, OK? . . .Hewitt: I think I would say they created, they lost the peace. They created the Libyan vacuum, they created the vacuum into which ISIS came, but they didn’t create ISIS. That’s what I would say.Trump: Well, I disagree.Hewitt: All right, that’s OK.Trump: I mean, with his bad policies, that’s why ISIS came about.Hewitt: That’s—Trump: If he would have done things properly, you wouldn’t have had ISIS.Hewitt: That’s true.Trump: Therefore, he was the founder of ISIS.
So Trump stuck to (or “doubled down on”) the formulation “founder of ISIS,” while also spelling out that what he meant by that was precisely what Hewitt supposed.
To put it in technical terms, Trump committed a fallacy of equivocation. As the Texas State University Department of Philosophy website explains: “The fallacy of equivocation occurs when a key term or phrase in an argument is used in an ambiguous way, with one meaning in one portion of the argument and then another meaning in another portion of the argument.”
A classic example of the fallacy of equivocation is a riddle apocryphally attributed to Abraham Lincoln. How many legs does a dog have, Lincoln is supposed to have asked, if you consider its tail to be a leg? The correct answer is four. A tail is not a leg, whether you consider it one or not.
Trump is not the first politician to commit a fallacy of equivocation. The most memorable example in recent history is Bill Clinton, the founder of “is” is. When Mr. Clinton said, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky,” he meant it to be understood as a blanket denial that any hanky-panky had occurred. Such a denial would have been false. But at least in Mr. Clinton’s own mind, his denial was literally true, because he was defining “sexual relations” narrowly, as referring only to intercourse.
There’s an important difference between Mr. Clinton’s equivocation and Trump’s. Mr. Clinton’s purpose was deception: He did not go on to inform listeners of the things he and Monica Lewinsky had done; that was left to the painstaking investigative efforts of the independent counsel’s office. If he had—if he explained what he meant by “sexual relations”—it would have defeated his purpose.
Trump’s purpose, by contrast, was hyperbole. At least when pressed by Hewitt, he was happy to explain what he had in mind. Not only that, but he was transparent about his tactics:
Hewitt: And that’s, I’d just use different language to communicate it. . . .Trump: But they wouldn’t talk about your language, and they do talk about my language, right?Hewitt: Well, good point. Good point.
Not only do “they” talk about Trump’s language; in doing so, they reinforce his underlying message. Let’s return to those “fact checks.” PolitiFact:
Democrats often blame President George W. Bush for the creation of ISIS, because al-Qaida flourished after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.But you could also argue Obama’s decision to leave Iraq after 2011 contributed to the security vacuum that gave ISIS the chance to put down roots and regroup.
Time.com:
There’s an element of truth to [Trump’s] clarification. Some national security experts have said that pulling out of Iraq in 2011 left the country vastly unprepared and helped create an environment where ISIS could expand and thrive. But the real blunder, many experts say, was President George W. Bush’s decision to invade Iraq in the first place without any real plan to bring stability. Mistakes aside, calling any U.S. president the “founder of ISIS” is a grave misrepresentation.
CNN:
Under the guidance of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi [ISIS] has capitalized on a series of missteps by both the George W. Bush and Obama administrations—along with a civil war in Syria and Iraqi government failures—to create a new global terror state.
And this is from a Daily Beast piece, which we didn’t quote above because it wasn’t framed as a fact check:
Assume you’re running for president . . . and you wish to criticize the sitting commander in chief for being oblivious to, if not accidentally enabling, the rise of the world’s deadliest terrorist organization. What might you say to make your case?You might point out that Barack Obama’s wholehearted support of an Iranian satrap in the form of the former Iraqi prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki—a man Obama described on the White House lawn in 2011 as the elected leader of “a sovereign, self-reliant and democratic Iraq” and the “most inclusive government” in that nation’s history—was probably a bit of a bloomer in hindsight, and an avoidable one.Obama’s own vice president correctly assessed, not a year earlier when the administration backed the premier for re-election, that Maliki “hates the goddamn Sunnis” and that the goddamn Sunnis are the bellwether constituency determining the fortunes of Sunni jihadism in Mesopotamia as well as the necessary bulwark for destroying and discrediting it, as Obama has lately discovered to his own embarrassment.You might also point to the near-criminal indifference by the current White House to the slow-motion catastrophe that has unfolded in Syria. Many decent and “non-radicalized” Syrians initially saw the United States as a prospective savior from Assadist atrocities. Now many view it as an Assad accomplice, just as Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of the so-called Islamic State, has been saying for years.
Mission accomplished for Trump: His hyperbolic statement that “Obama was the founder of ISIS” prompted media figures hostile to him and sympathetic to Obama and Mrs. Clinton to spill a good deal of figurative ink acknowledging his real point, that the Obama administration’s missteps helped ISIS to grow. That they also faulted George W. Bush doesn’t hurt the case, since Trump says he opposes the Iraq war, in favor of which then-Sen. Clinton voted in 2002.
It was enough to drive Mediaite’s Tommy Christopher to despair:
On Friday, . . . even after Trump had given up the trick to the entire news media, they fell for it again. With some of the discussion turning toward Trump’s own 2007 comments that the US should “get out” of Iraq, and needing to cap off the week with a win, Trump tweeted that he was just being sarcastic when he called Obama the founder of ISIS. Like Imperial Stormtroopers looking for ’droids, the media commenced a dutiful flurry of panel hits and surrogate interviews devoted to Trump’s “walkback,” all of which once again contained the talking point in question posed as the reasonable thing Trump should have said. Since he sent it, Trump’s tweet has been reported forty times on MSNBC and CNN.
And yet. While Trump scored a masterful tactical victory—and, let us note, won an argument over policy—it could turn out that he’s making an important strategic error. Presidents typically maintain an air of seriousness, and voters may feel that Trump’s unconstrained use of sarcasm and hyperbole sets an unpresidential tone.
