Dirty tricks & lies: What is the scope of presidential legitimacy?

The NYT reports on a cute little trick that Republican Texas governor John Connally played on Jimmy Carter to sabotage Carter's re-election campaign against Reagan. Connally was hoping to sabotage Carter to gain a prominent spot in the Reagan administration: 

It was 1980 and Jimmy Carter was in the White House, bedeviled by a hostage crisis in Iran that had paralyzed his presidency and hampered his effort to win a second term. Mr. Carter’s best chance for victory was to free the 52 Americans held captive before Election Day. That was something that Mr. Barnes said his mentor was determined to prevent.

His mentor was John B. Connally Jr., a titan of American politics and former Texas governor who had served three presidents and just lost his own bid for the White House. A former Democrat, Mr. Connally had sought the Republican nomination in 1980 only to be swamped by former Gov. Ronald Reagan of California. Now Mr. Connally resolved to help Mr. Reagan beat Mr. Carter and in the process, Mr. Barnes said, make his own case for becoming secretary of state or defense in a new administration.

What happened next Mr. Barnes has largely kept secret for nearly 43 years. Mr. Connally, he said, took him to one Middle Eastern capital after another that summer, meeting with a host of regional leaders to deliver a blunt message to be passed to Iran: Don’t release the hostages before the election. Mr. Reagan will win and give you a better deal.

Mr. Carter’s camp has long suspected that Mr. Casey or someone else in Mr. Reagan’s orbit sought to secretly torpedo efforts to liberate the hostages before the election, and books have been written on what came to be called the October surprise. But congressional investigations debunked previous theories of what happened.

“History needs to know that this happened,” Mr. Barnes, who turns 85 next month, said in one of several interviews, his first with a news organization about the episode. “I think it’s so significant and I guess knowing that the end is near for President Carter put it on my mind more and more and more. I just feel like we’ve got to get it down some way.”  

Confirming Mr. Barnes’s account is problematic after so much time. Mr. Connally, Mr. Casey and other central figures have long since died and Mr. Barnes has no diaries or memos to corroborate his account. But he has no obvious reason to make up the story and indeed expressed trepidation at going public because of the reaction of fellow Democrats [Barnes is a Texas Democrat].

Illegitimate US presidents

This story triggered an unusually unpleasant thought. Based on my own core political moral values, fidelity to facts, true truths and sound reasoning, it arguably is the case that the US has probably had a lot of illegitimate presidents. How could that be?

For me, this mental journey started with Trump and what some US intelligence experts believed was a necessary role of Russian interference before the 2016 elections. Other factors were necessary, e.g., Comey's calling out an investigation of Hillary just before the election, with some arguably more important than Putin. Nonetheless, I came to believe that Putin's interference was one of the necessary factors in Trump's win. That led me to conclude that Trump was an illegitimate president, in large part because Putin had poisoned too many American votes by spreading lies and slanders about Hillary. Those voters were deceived and manipulated.

Before that, I had read a book by moral philosopher Sissela Bok, Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life.[1] There she described how Lyndon Johnson lied to the American people about his intentions for the Vietnam war. Publicly he claimed to be the peace candidate who would end the war. Privately he intended to escalate the war. That led me to understand how immoral or even evil (if people get harmed or killed) deceit of voters can be. Johnson's deceit took away from voters the power to decide on the basis of truth whether they supported war in Vietnam or not. 

Somewhere along the way, I became aware of Nixon committing treason by torpedoing peace talks with North Vietnam to help his own presidential campaign in 1968. Again, the American voters were deceived. Here, the false belief was propaganda that the Vietnam peace talks were not progressing. That left Nixon free to argue he would do a much better job making peace. It was a promise based on pure deceit.

Now this NYT story about John Connally pops up. Connally at least tried to sabotage hostage negotiations with Iran in a self-serving effort to harm Carter's re-election chances. Assuming that sabotage effort was successful, Americans were deceived once again. They were deprived of the power to decide how to vote on the basis of truth.

Based on that evidence, I've come to this unpleasant belief: Johnson, Nixon, Reagan and Trump were all illegitimate presidents, if one defines illegitimacy as power obtained by too much intentional, unwarranted deceit, including irrational emotional manipulation. On reflection, maybe there have been a lot of  illegitimate US presidents. But as I see it and judge in light of my morals and reasoning, at least those four were not legitimate.

Of course, how much deceit is too much? The bickering in that point will never end. There's probably at least some deceit about federal and high level state candidates in all or nearly all campaigns. That is what probably most people who are uncomfortable with a conclusion of illegitimate elected politicians will say does not render any significantly deceit-based candidate illegitimate. 

If that is true, then Bok's assertion that deceit is immoral is false. I do not believe that is true.

On the basis of too much deceit one can argue that there have been no illegitimate presidents because voters should accept a lot of lies, slanders, dirty tricks and crackpottery in the rough and tumble of politics. Is that really true? That's true for deceit-based politics. That's also true for anti-democracy politics. With authoritarians and demagogues espousing brass knuckles capitalism, theocratic Christian nationalism and some variant of old-fashioned, hard core fascism, socialism or communism, truth is not a moral concern. For the authoritarians, truth is what the tyrants, plutocrats, kleptocrats or theocrats say it is. That assertion is not rationally contestable, except of course by the deceivers.

Qs: Were some or all of Johnson, Nixon, Reagan and Trump illegitimate? Is Barnes lying about Connelly trying to sabotage Carter? How can voters know things that are kept from them and still make an informed choice of who to vote for? Is, or should there be there no such thing an an illegitimate elected politician based on too much deceit, e.g. because most lying, deceit and unprosecuted slandering are free speech, either protected by law or by failure to prosecute? Do you personally accept a lot of lies, slanders, dirty tricks and crackpottery in the rough and tumble of politics, or would you prefer a lot less of it? What about George Santos? Trump?[2]

Footnote: 

1. Bok wrote:

The social incentives to deceit are at present very powerful; the controls often weak. Many individuals feel caught up in practices they cannot change. It would be wishful thinking, therefore, to expect individuals to bring about major changes in the collective practices of deceit by themselves. Public and private institutions, with their enormous power to affect personal choice, must help alter the existing pressures and incentives. ..... Trust and integrity are precious resources, easily squandered, hard to regain. They can thrive only on a foundation of respect for veracity.

When political representatives or entire governments arrogate to themselves the right to lie, they take power from the public that would not have been given up voluntarily. .... But such cases [that justify lying] are so rare that they hardly exist for practical purposes. .... The consequences of spreading deception, alienation and lack of trust could not have been documented for us more concretely than they have in the past decades. We have had a very vivid illustration of how lies undermine our political system. .... Those in government and other positions of trust should be held to the highest standards. Their lies are not ennobled by their positions; quite the contrary. .... only those deceptive practices which can be openly debated and consented to in advance are justifiable in a democracy.

2. By the time Trump had been in office for a year or so, I came to believe that he should be impeached for lying, deceiving, slandering and crackpotting far too much. His constant dark free speech struck at the heart of democracy, civil liberties, the rule of law, ethics, honest governance, secularism, pluralism, and respect for inconvenient facts, true truths and sound reasoning. His current dark free speech still poisons minds and tries to kill the same good and decent things.

Lest we forget, his final tally of false or misleading statements by the WaPo fact checker: Trump’s false or misleading claims total 30,573 over 4 years