Trump’s War on Time

The phrase “even a broken clock is right twice a day” has been floating in the backwash since at least 1711, when Joseph Addison used it in The Spectator. Critics have been reaching for it ever since, whenever they needed some explanation for how some clown had accidentally gotten something correct. The exception that proves the fool.

We have been trying to apply this idiom to Donald Trump for ten years. Problem is it doesn’t work. A broken clock, by definition, displays a fixed time. And because the Earth keeps rotating, the fixed time will match the actual time twice every twenty-four hours. Nothing moves, but the semidiurnal accuracy is mathematically guaranteed.

Trump’s clock is not stopped, unfortunately. It is just running on a completely different time zone than yours or any human being who functions in a shared reality. Trump’s timezone is one where every grievance is still thriving, the future is a lawsuit not yet filed, and the present is an eternal deposition he is trying to get out of.

This means even when he’s occasionally right, it’s for all the wrong reasons. His clock doesn’t tell time. It tells you what he needs to be true right now, what we must not help him lie about. Because here is what the brain science tells us: your brain files a lie and a correction in the same folder. The “false” tag always arrives after the damage ravages the innocent.

Donald knows this the way a Trump kid knows how to exploit his last name. He doesn’t think about it; he just gets there first. He wins the timestamp, not the argument. The correction is always playing catch-up to a story that’s already been filed.

Very soon. Very complete. Only just begun.

On January 20th of this year — one year into his second term, 1,542 days after the polls closed on Tuesday, November 3, 2020 — Trump stood in the White House and said Joe Biden was “a man that didn’t win the election, by the way. It was a rigged election, everybody knows that now. Numbers are coming out that show it even more plainly. We caught him.” CNN’s fact-check of the anniversary presser confirms his Big Lie has only aged into greater absurdity.

After more than a full year, a Department of Justice led by his defense lawyers and every opportunity to uncover what would have been the greatest and most pervasive conspiracy in American history, which would include some 60 judges, many appointed by Trump and other Republicans, the regime has offered no evidence to back up any claims. The FBI’s egregious seizing of ballots in Georgia was entirely based on nonsense that was debunked a half-decade ago. He hasn’t even found new lies, even as he’s planning a “national emergency” around the old ones.

Then, nine days into a war he started with Israel against Iran, Trump told reporters from his golf resort in Miami the conflict would be over “very soon.” Later the same day he told CBS it was “very complete, pretty much.” Then he threatened to hit Iran “twenty times harder” and said the most important targets were still ahead. The Pentagon said “we have only just begun to fight.” Iran’s Revolutionary Guard said Iran, not the U.S., would decide when the war ends.

Very soon. Very complete. Only just begun. It’s been going on 47 years. All true simultaneously, in the same afternoon, from the same man, off the same broken clock.

Then there is the girls’ school and one — and this is a high bar — of the worst lies Donald Trump has told in a long, long life of deceptions, where he has been a millionaire due to tax fraud since age eight.

On February 28th, the first day of the war, a strike hit the Shajarah Tayyebeh elementary school in Minab, killing at least 165 people, most of them children. Trump’s response, one week later: Iran did it. “Based on what I’ve seen, that was done by Iran. They’re very inaccurate with their munitions.” His own defense secretary, standing next to him, would say only that they were “certainly investigating.” Video geolocated by Bellingcat showed a Tomahawk cruise missile hitting the compound. Tomahawks are made by Raytheon. Only the U.S., UK, and Australia operate them. A preliminary U.S. intelligence assessment concluded the U.S. was “likely” responsible. Trump’s answer: Iran “also has some Tomahawks.” It doesn’t. When pressed, he said: “I just don’t know enough about it.”

He didn’t say he was wrong. He said he didn’t know. On his broken clock, time only exists to mark the next lie he’ll tell.

The lying and the clock are the same problem

In a previous piece, I argued that Trump doesn’t lie to be believed — he lies to be repeated. That the debunking feeds the ritual. What I didn’t get to is this: the lying and the broken clock are the same problem. He is not suppressing a truth he knows. He is reading the time off a clock that has never been calibrated to reality, and announcing it with total confidence, because in his timezone, where only his ego must be respected, it is correct.

Every second Trump is alive is a second he could be suing someone, which means every second is also a second the verdict hasn’t come in yet. The 253 contractors who built the Trump Taj Mahal were stiffed tens of millions of dollars, most getting 30 cents on the dollar after years in bankruptcy court. The Trump Taj Mahal has been closed for a decade.

The 2020 election is not the past to him. It is a grievance still resolving. A lawsuit still in discovery. He didn’t lose. He’s just not winning… yet.

Apply this to Iran. “Very soon” is not a promise and not even a lie in the ordinary sense. It is a man announcing a future he has already moved into, regardless of whether the bombs have stopped falling. He said it ends soon. Therefore, it ends soon. The IRGC saying otherwise is just the kind of thing people say in a deposition when they’re trying to screw you.

That’s why he has always needed to fool people into pretending otherwise — marshalling the awful, lulling the desperate, and enticing the powerful by servicing their shared greed.

The clock he built is the trap we’re in with him

You cannot correct a man who grades his own tests. Telling him he’s wrong about when the war ends is like telling him not to cheat at Solitaire.

What you can do is make the costs fall on people who experience time normally. The Republicans applauding this war will face voters in November who have been paying $5-a-gallon gas since February. Those voters experience time. They remember prices. They will be in the booth when “very soon” is six months old and still ongoing.

Trump’s broken clock is his panic room, the place he retreats to whenever reality gets too close. It’s also the trap he built for himself. He can declare victory every afternoon and mean it every time. He cannot make the people around him stop experiencing consequences. The 1,255 Iranians already dead, the eight American service members, the oil that surged past $110 a barrel, the markets that cratered and only came back because traders briefly believed “very soon” — these exist in ordinary time, where the past is fixed and the bill comes due.

The broken clock, at least, has stopped pretending.

The rest of us are stuck checking his clock like it might be right. Every debunk, every fact-check, every outraged correction is us treating his timezone like it deserves a response. It doesn’t. It deserves to be ignored in favor of the one on the wall.

The one on the wall says: 165 children are dead in Minab. That happened in real time, on a real date, with a real missile made by Raytheon. The 2020 election was settled 1,542 days ago. The Taj Mahal contractors got 30 cents on the dollar and haven’t forgotten. These are fixed points. They don’t move because he announces otherwise.

In 2020, time ran out. Sixty judges said no. The country said no.

It’s winning in Iran too, unfortunately, one dead child at a time, in a timezone he cannot touch and cannot spin and cannot sue. The question is only how long we let him keep winding the clock before we take it away from him.

The alternative to debunking is getting to the timestamp first. Don’t wait for him to define the moment and then chase it. Not “Trump is wrong about the girls’ school” — “a U.S. Tomahawk hit the Shajarah Tayyebeh elementary school on February 28th and killed 165 people, most of them children, and here is the video.” Not “Trump is lying about 2020” — “sixty judges, including his own, looked at the evidence and found none, and that happened, and it is over.” The assertion plants the timestamp. It gives the brain a fixed point to return to when the clock starts spinning.

This is what his broken clock costs us that nobody names plainly: we are no longer just advocates for each other, for policy, for democracy. We are now advocates for reality itself. We are defenders of linear time.

Trump put that burden on us. So we stand up for each other. And for the clock that we all share.

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