Trump, Nixon, and the Institutional Rupture of Truth

When Lying Becomes a Method

The question is no longer whether democracies can survive occasional lies,but how long institutions will tolerate contradiction, improvisation and contempt for facts

Opinion

By Karma Yogi

Comparisons between Richard Nixon and Donald Trump have become commonplace. They are meaningful, however, only if one looks beyond the gravity of scandals and focuses instead on the nature of the relationship to truth, and above all on its institutional consequences.

Trump & Nixon. Pic – Politico

In Nixon’s case, lying was targeted and concealed. It aimed to cover specific illegal acts — the Watergate break-in and the obstruction of justice — in the hope that the system would not trace responsibility back to the White House. Nixon knew he was crossing red lines. Even as he sought to deceive institutions, he implicitly recognised their authority. Once it became clear that Congress and his own party would no longer shield him, he stepped aside. The system had been shaken, but it held.

Redefining Reality

With Trump, the relationship to truth is of a different order. It is public, repetitive, and unapologetic. The objective is no longer to conceal an illegal act but to redefine reality through assertion. From the outset of his presidency, he claimed that his inauguration drew “the largest crowd in history,” in blatant contradiction with indisputable visual evidence. During the Covid-19 pandemic, he insisted the virus would “disappear on its own,” even as federal agencies warned of its severity.

The challenge to the 2020 presidential election marked a far deeper rupture. By asserting — without evidence — that a certified election upheld by the courts had been “stolen,” Trump crossed a line Nixon never approached: the explicit questioning of electoral legitimacy itself.

The Chagos Case

To these outright falsehoods must be added a pattern of half-truths and abrupt reversals, often destabilising internationally. The Chagos case is particularly telling. Only a year earlier, Trump had welcomed the agreement reached between the United Kingdom and Mauritius, implicitly acknowledging that a settlement consistent with international law and the advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice was both legitimate and stabilising.

As underlined by Professor Marc Weller of Chatham House in an expert comment on 26 January, 2026, Trump’s Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, in an official communication purporting to “US Support for UK and Mauritius Agreement on Chagos Archipelago” just before the Agreement was signed in May 2025, effusively welcomed and endorsed the said Agreement — a binding statement, in terms of international law and diplomatic practice, when made by a sitting Foreign Minister.

Yet, in the wake of the UK’s position on Greenland, he went on to describe the return of the Chagos to Mauritius as “an act of great stupidity.” This sudden reversal — unsupported by legal argument or strategic coherence — reflects not a considered reassessment but a circumstantial reaction. It raises a simple question: can leadership be taken seriously when positions on matters of international sovereignty fluctuate with mood and alignment?

This inconsistency recalls another revealing episode: after minimising, one day, the contribution of British troops in Afghanistan, he reversed course the next, in the face of outrage and unbridled condemnation unleashed and upon being reminded that more than four hundred UK soldiers had lost their lives there — another volte-face which, through repetition, steadily erodes the credibility of presidential speech on the international stage.

Here lies the essential difference with Nixon. Nixon lied to avoid sanction; Trump lies, or rambles in simplicity, in order to weaken the constraint of reality itself, a pattern so entrenched that a cursory search today yields an extensive compendium of documented lies, distortions, and half-truths catalogued by independent fact-checking institutions. Checks and balances are no longer merely bypassed; they are openly delegitimised when such institutions as courts, the press, independent institutions and even the electoral process are disparaged.

For the international community, and particularly for small states committed to multilateralism, this evolution is deeply troubling. In 1974, allies doubted a man, not the American system. Today, many distinguish between institutions still seen as solid, and an executive perceived as unpredictable, inconsistent, and dismissive of the consequences of its words.

The question, therefore, is no longer whether democracies can survive occasional lies — history suggests they can — but how long institutions will tolerate contradiction, improvisation and contempt for facts becoming entrenched at the summit of power without a decisive systemic response? Add to that the rapid slide of the country down the reputational scale on the international stage.

So, who will bell the cat or is it rather when?

Mauritius Times ePaper Friday 30 January 2026