When does a collection of words become identifiable as an argument at all, much less a convincing one? As Donald Trump and his running mate J.D. Vance have been reminding us again and again, unleashing torrents of words with great confidence does not constitute making an intelligible argument. To be sure, being arrogant and abusive is sometimes an effective form of sophistry, but it is not what anyone could recognize as reasoned argumentation. Trump, Vance, and their supporters either do not know the difference or do not care. As always, they prefer the strategies favored by demagogues: to inflame, to enrage, and to mislead, but never to make arguments that could actually persuade anyone who is not already a true believer.
Two weeks ago tonight, Kamala Harris dominated Donald Trump in front of a live audience of 67 million people. For reasons that I explained in a recent column, I do not dignify events like that one by calling them “debates,” because they are no such thing. In any case, Trump has been claiming from the moment that the non-debate ended that he was cheated, that he won, and that the insane lies that he shouted on that stage are true. Some of the people who admit that Trump was lying, however, quickly pivoted to the idea that Harris somehow needs to be held to more demanding standards than Trump and Vance (who are barely held to any standards at all).
Below, I will take a close look at two of the claims that Vance has made in the aftermath of Trump’s humiliating performance in Philadelphia. Vance recently admitted that he has consciously decided to “create stories,” and he has separately claimed that the Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, are not “legal immigrants.” even though there is no doubt about their legal status.
My interest in those two examples is less in explaining how outlandish Vance’s claims are than in asking why supposedly nonpartisan, avowedly skeptical journalists and commentators seem not even to notice that Vance is simply saying words that are at best empty and at worst illogical nonsense.
In any case, neither Trump nor Vance is able to construct a coherent argument, yet the U.S. political conversation fails to punish them for it—or apparently even to notice their serial failures.
The Flip-Flop Thing Is the Least of It: Assertions are Not Arguments
Last week, in a two–part column here on Verdict, I pointed out that many of Trump’s allies have tried to convince us that Trump’s problem is style and not substance. The idea seems to bethat if he could only be disciplined enough to “talk policy,” rather than going down rabbit holes about flush toilets or fictional cannibals, Trump could convince voters that his policy solutions are sound. The problem with that notion, however, is that Trump has proposed almost no policy solutions, and those that he has proposed would make matters much worse. Moreover, Trump cannot simply adopt the Republican Party’s longstanding set of policy ideas, because everything on their wish-list—from taking away Americans’ health insurance to fighting even the most popular and minimal gun safety legislation to ending reproductive freedom to preventing people from voting—is politically toxic.
Trump’s staunchest defenders are thus reduced to telling him that he must engage in naked scaremongering about the economy and immigration, even though he (and they) can offer no solutions to address any of the anger that they are stoking.
All the while, Harris has shown herself to be more than capable of discussing policy issues, but a new game has arisen in which she is faulted for changing her positions on various issues, even earning her the dreaded “flip-flopper” label. Because of that baseless pile-on, she is being judged harshly.
In Part One of this column yesterday, I pointed out that there is an important difference between changing the policies that one supports and abandoning one’s goals and values. An environmentalist can, for example, still be an environmentalist even while changing her views about the mix of dirty and clean energy that she would be willing to support in light of the constraints imposed by political realities.
In addition, a person can believe that new evidence calls for a different response to a problem, such as when people who favored the drug war should have changed their minds after seeing drug use go up even as poor, nonviolent offenders were being sent in droves to spend decades in prison.
Unfortunately, however, the inanity of these attacks on Harris—again, not only from her political opponents but from mainstream journalists—is only a subspecies of a growing inability to distinguish between rational arguments and mere claptrap. Here in Part Two, therefore, I am expanding the discussion beyond the question of flipping and flopping and explaining why the definition of the word “argument” seems recently to have been drained of all meaning.
The bottom line is that Harris makes actual arguments, usually good arguments, while far too many people think that the substantive equivalent of saying, “Nuh uh, she’s wrong!” counts as a meaningful and responsive argument. This is perhaps the most distilled form of a double standard, where Harris is faulted for not making every argument that anyone thinks she should have made, while Trump and Vance are taken seriously after saying things that a high school sophomore would be embarrassed to say.
It Turns Out That Arguing is Not Easy
A famous Monty Python sketch, “Argument Clinic,” brilliantly lampooned the idea that simply denying or challenging what another person says counts as arguing. The key moment arrives when the sane person in the sketch tells the insane person that saying “No it isn’t” is mere contradiction, which is not an argument. The protagonist then explains that “an argument is a connected series of statements intended to establish a proposition,” at which point his mindless opponent blusters forward and says, “No it isn’t!” It is a classic comedy sketch that endures because it captures the frustrating situation in which we often find ourselves talking with someone who has no interest in making a genuine argument.
Perhaps surprisingly, some of the worst offenders in the words-that-don’t-add-up-to-arguments camp are lawyers. Indeed, one of the worst reasons to go to law school is one that we hear most often: “I’m good at arguing.” As it happens, arguing is not what lawyers spend most of their time doing (and it is not even a necessary skill for most legal tasks). More interestingly, however, many people who think that they are good at arguing are in fact very bad at it. They know how to be contrarian, belligerent, and disagreeable, but they freeze up when they actually have to explain their arguments or—heaven forbid—rebut a counterargument.
One day when I was in law school, I was surprised to hear a third-year student in a seminar respond to an argument from another student by stating flatly, “I don’t buy it.” I was happy that the professor decided not to mock the student but instead asked him to provide some content. Like, maybe offer an argument of his own? Even after multiple prompts from the professor, however, the student—without any sign of embarrassment—finally said, “I don’t know, I still just don’t buy it.” Notably, this was a person who was only months away from completing a law degree at a top-ten law school.
Even so, the word “argue” and its various forms are now often taken to be exact synonyms of “reply” or “assert.” My former classmate, for example, might have related the story above by saying: “He argued X, but I argued that I didn’t buy it. I sure told him.” The most amusing caricature of that failure of reasoning that I have come across is simple: “‘You’re an idiot,’ he argued.”
Sometimes, there might be the germ of an argument in someone’s words, but the statement is so minimal and undeveloped that an argument needs to be constructed ex post. For example, I once heard someone talking to a friend, explaining in pained terms how badly her husband treated her. The friend responded: “Well, all couples argue.” There, we might with some effort be able to find the semblance of an argument, along the lines of a syllogism: “All couples argue. You’re in a couple. Unsurprisingly, you and your husband argue.”
But that is not even an argument, because even though it purports to be a universal truth, it has no argumentative content. If the response is meant to say, “So it’s no big deal,” then there is a huge gap in the logic. Does this couple argue more than other couples? Are their arguments abusive or threatening? And so on. The person who casually tossed off the words “Well, all couples argue,” spoke as if she were saying something meaningful, that is, as if she had made an argument. But what she said was either not an argument at all or it was a very bad one that could easily be defeated.
To extend the previous point, even something that in some minimal way constitues an argument is not necessarily a good argument. Trying “to establish a proposition,” in the Python troupe’s words, must include making an argument that can stand up to a reasoned response. “I made an argument, and reasonable people can disagree, but that doesn’t make me wrong” is not how arguing works. Some propositions cannot be proved to be true through the rigors of back-and-forth argumentation, but some can be. Even more importantly, many propositions can be disproved, and that is often more than enough.
Vance’s Non- or Weak Arguments About the Anti-Haitian Hate That He is Peddling
It felt necessary to go into that rather academic discussion of what it even means to argue, because the U.S. political discussion has become so nonsensical in recent years.
After the recent Harris-Trump non-debate, we learned that Vance was the proximate source of Trump’s incendiary and racist claim that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, are stealing and eating non-immigrants’ house pets. (Even after thirteen days of nonstop coverage about that story, it is jarring even to write such a sentence.) Subsequent reporting has shown that Vance had even been told by the local Republican politicians that no such thing was happening, but Vance ignored them and pushed the hateful lies that Trump then made infamous.
What has Vance offered in response? At one point, he claimed that even though there is no proof that any of that is happening, there is no proof that it is not happening, which is either a non-argument or the most nihilistic argument ever made. After all, if we are permitted to make any baseless assertion that comes to mind and expect it stand unless and until someone can definitively prove it wrong, then we are in LaLa Land.
More interestingly, Vance responded to a question about his lies by combatively saying: “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.”
Understandably, the words “create stories” received a lot of attention. That Vance readily—even proudly—copped to creating stories is undeniably a very big deal. I am thus not saying that Vance did not receive criticism, because he did, and rightly so. I am, however, saying that few people seem to have noticed that even though he went through the motions of making an argument, he contradicted himself while doing so.
Recall that Vance tried to rationalize his lies by saying that he had no choice but to create his stories, because only then would the media “pay[] attention to the suffering of the American people.” The problem is that his stories did not have that effect at all. Indeed, he did not even pretend to have examples of real-world problems that the media had been ignoring. Instead, Vance’s lies themselves became the source of suffering for Americans living in Springfield, Ohio,– including White, U.S.-born, Christian Republicans—who have for the past two weeks been living in fear because of bomb threats, neo-Nazi intimidation, and an atmosphere of hysteria.
Vance, then, argued that he had to make things up in order to get the press to stop ignoring suffering. If we are to credit him with making any kind of argument at all, the best we could do would be this: Only if I lie will untold stories at long last be told. That did not happen, however, because it is not what Vance tried to make happen. He is either incapable of making a coherent argument, or he is a liar, or both. I vote for both.
It became even worse, however, when Vance angrily responded to a reporter who pointed out that the Haitians who are living in Springfield are in the United States legally. Vance and the rest of the xenophobic Trump camp had been calling those immigrants “illegals,” which among other things confirms what we already knew, which is that the Trump/Vance people hate all immigrants while hiding behind the “but only the ones that don’t come here the right way” dodge.
Although I suppose that we could call Vance’s response innovative in its inanity, that does not make his answer any less scary. After first dismissing the question as a “media and Kamala Harris fact-check,” Vance barked at the reporter:
Now the media loves to say that the Haitian migrants … they are here legally. And what they mean is that Kamala Harris used two separate programs: mass parole and temporary protective status. She used two programs to wave a wand and to say, “We’re not going to deport those people here.”
Well, if Kamala Harris waves the wand illegally, and says these people are now here legally, I’m still going to call them an illegal alien. An illegal action from Kamala Harris does not make an alien legal. That is not how this works.
Some of this is merely Vance using the now-standard tactic of loading up his statements with so many falsehoods and leaps of illogic that it becomes impossible to pay attention to all of them. It is shameful but understandable, then, that people did not bother to call him out on his assertion that the media is in cahoots with the Harris campaign, nor did I see any commentator point out that Harris in fact had nothing to do with granting parole or protective status. It is a measure of how bad things have become that we no longer even notice such dishonesty, but here we are.
To be clear, Vance has a law degree. More to the point, he appears to believe that he can string together an argument. There is no reason to try to decide whether his statement above is a bad argument or not an argument at all, because either way, it is not a winning argument.
Vance says that taking an illegal action does not make it legal, which is simply circular reasoning, or what real debaters call a tautology. And it is notable that in competitive debating, offering a tautology is a guaranteed way to lose the debate. “A is true because we define A to be true” is not an argument.
It is worse than that, however, because Vance—who, again, received a law degree from a prestigious university—says that two legal programs are merely a “magic wand” for erasing illegal status rather than the very essence of what differentiates legality from illegality. He raged: “That is not how this works.” But that is exactly how this works—where “this” is cogent argumentation and simple logic.
It seems almost insulting to Verdict’s readers even to go down this blind alley, because Vance’s mistake is patently obvious, even in the most mundane of situations. In New Orleans, for example, it is legal to walk out of a bar with an alcoholic beverage in hand and walk down the sidewalk. In almost every other jurisdiction in the country, however, that is illegal. What is the difference? The legally constituted governments with jurisdiction over New Orleans say that public drinking is legal. Other governments say that it is illegal. Neither has waved a magic wand, unless “passing laws” is magic. Again, this is embarrassingly basic.
People who think that drinking in public is bad might say that it should be illegal everywhere, but it is not. Vance evidently believes that all immigration should be illegal, but again, it is not. What J.D. Vance wants is not (yet?) the law of the land. What he is complaining about is simply how the law works, because we can only know what is legal or illegal by applying the law as it exists.
This is, in other words, one of the all-time lowest points that we have seen in American political discourse. At best, however, reporters have dutifully reported Vance’s remarks and explained the underlying laws that allowed Haitians to move to Springfield legally. Although such reporting, when done well, is a genuine public service, it misses the sheer insanity of what Vance is saying. And more to the point here, it treats an on-its-face bonkers claim as if it were a serious argument.
Again, a trained U.S. lawyer said—out loud, in public, and with no sign of being impaired—that people are not in the country legally even when they were invited to enter the country and did so under valid provisions of the United States Code. That he is not being laughed off the political stage is a scandal.
In the end, where are we? Kamala Harris is faulted for not explaining to everyone’s satisfaction every time that she has changed her mind about how to solve problems, and she is called a flip-flopper even when she has offered cogent explanations of her evolving views. Meanwhile, J.D. Vance wanders around the country not only spewing hatred and vitriol but making the most basic logical errors imaginable. The Monty Python guys would surely bow down to Vance’s masterful self-parody.
