Reductio ad Absurdum in Flagrante Delicto: The Presidency of Donald J. Trump
In Latin, ‘Reductio ad Absurdum’ means “reduction to the level of crazy.” It’s a debate strategy which fits under the concept of ‘critical thinking.’ Ancient Western philosophers discovered the reduction strategy as a way to expose the logic or lack thereof of assertions in debates. When it works, reasonable people are under normal circumstances forced to agree: This assertion is crazy! we say. When it fails, reasonable people will say, this assertion is brilliant.
Suppose as the city controller I wanted to remove traffic lights as a strategy to balance the city’s budget. I need arguments. “Removing traffic lights would improve traffic flow.” Is this brilliant? Or is it nuts?
Well, wouldn’t it? How many times have you been stuck behind a red light? Have you ever had to pay the fine for making a rolling red light at a corner? Don’t drivers do just fine when the lights go out?
Let’s assume this assertion is true and defensible. Of course, we would like to get rid of this obstacle. But let’s stretch out the logic. Let’s look at the assertion as a premise, the beginnings of an argument in need of evidence, rather than as a conclusion to buy or walk away from.
Assuming the truth value of the premise, uncontrolled intersections must move traffic more efficiently than controlled ones. Then why do home dwellers petition the city to install traffic lights on dangerous intersections with increases in accidents? Are there instances where communities have petitioned to take lights out?
If uncontrolled intersections are more efficient, then higher traffic volumes should flow better without signals. More cars should pass through intersections per hour. Accident rates should decrease. Peak congestion should improve.
If uncontrolled intersections are not more efficient, what is the chance that multiple cars would attempt simultaneous crossings? Right-of-way confusion would increase. Stop-and-go patterns would emerge anyway. Throughput would decrease due to hesitation/confusion.
The frustration of waiting at a red light doesn't mean the system isn't optimizing overall flow. Similarly, individual moments of regulatory friction don't prove a system would work better without traffic lights.
In short, the assertion we started with sounds crazy. In Latin we would call it absurd.
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Plato recorded an example of reductio in action in his Republic and gave us Socrates' Defense of Justice where Socrates takes up the proposition: "Justice is whatever benefits the stronger.” Assuming this assertion true, Socrates raises the possibility of fallibility.
If this were true, when rulers make mistakes about their own interests, citizens would be obligated to agree with assertions that harm the rulers in the end. That, my friend, is absurd—and relevant to our current Trumpian moment. It contradicts the original premise that justice is whatever benefits the stronger.
In more formal terms, this “indirect proof,” as Aristotle called it, posits that an assertion must be logically wrong if it leads to an illogical conclusion. The following excerpt taken from the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, a scholarly account of the reductio strategy, elaborates on three main ways such assertions fail by self-refutation:
a self-contradiction (ad absurdum)
a falsehood (ad falsum or even ad impossible)
an implausibility or anomaly (ad ridiculum or ad incommodum)
Aristotle posited that heavier objects fall faster than lighter ones, proportional to their weight. Galileo, however, devised a thought experiment to expose the logical inconsistency in this claim. Galileo argued that if Aristotle's principle were true, attaching a lighter object to a heavier one would create contradictory outcomes. The lighter object should slow down the heavier one, as it falls more slowly, acting as a drag. However, the combined system of the two objects would be heavier than the heavier object alone and, by Aristotle's logic, should fall faster.
This contradiction undermines the coherence of Aristotle's premise, leading Galileo to reject it. While Galileo's thought experiment effectively highlighted flaws in Aristotle's reasoning, modern physicists note that his argument was not sufficient to establish the law of falling bodies conclusively. Galileo did not rely on empirical evidence in this case but rather on logical reasoning. His famous inclined plane experiments later provided empirical support for his assertion that in a vacuum, all objects fall at the same rate regardless of their mass. Modern physics relies on empirical evidence derived from theoretically sound frameworks as essential for establishing scientific laws.
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As I demonstrated in my post a few days ago, Trump unsuccessfully used the reductio strategy recently, arguing that the collision of a commercial flight and a military helicopter over the Potomac was the result of ‘woke’ hiring policies by the FAA. This strategy is more of a feature than a bug of his rhetorical posture. He has managed to persuade the United States of America to accept his reductio arguments despite their obvious failures. Recall that “DEI hiring policies caused this helicopter to crash into the airplane” is fallacious on so many levels—it’s absurd, it’s impossible, and it’s implausible—yet it worked for some.
Trump’s first term was a grab bag of reductio arguments. During his first term, for example, Trump argued that "If we stopped testing right now, we'd have very few cases, if any." He argued that the rising case numbers were a result of increased testing. A bit later he tried to massage his message in a tweet:
“Our testing is so much bigger and more advanced than any other country (we have done a great job on this!) that it shows more cases. Without testing, or weak testing, we would be showing almost no cases. Testing is a double edged sword – Makes us look bad, but good to have!!!”
Is this argument wrongheaded because, when you follow it to its logical conclusion, it is absurd, false, or implausible? Let’s see. We should test less because it is making us look worse. Assumption: The goal is to look good. Here are five parallel statements that exposes the flawed logic. By the way, this form of imitation is a useful teaching strategy to hammer the point home:
"We should stop conducting food safety inspections because they reveal too many violations in restaurants." Why is this absurd?
"We should reduce financial audits because they expose too many accounting irregularities in corporations." Is this legal?
"We should eliminate vehicle safety inspections because they identify too many dangerous cars on the road." Do you wonder if this is plausible? It sounds like it comes from a dark comedy.
"We should discontinue water quality testing because it shows too many contaminants in our drinking supply." Implausible. Maybe from the same cult film.
"We should cease conducting building inspections because they reveal too many structural defects in our infrastructure." Same comment.
Each statement, like Trump's COVID-19 testing argument, proposes eliminating a crucial safety measure simply because it effectively identifies problems that require attention and resolution. The logic attempts to make the detection of problems appear worse than the problems themselves.
It’s false to argue that CDC tested to make the country look good. The purpose was to ground prevention strategies in biological facts. Testing, in fact, was implemented to save lives. Trump’s assertion was, therefore, not just crazy, but antithetical to the conclusion of medical professionals charged with saving lives. Testing in the scientific community was not a double-edged sword, but desperate, courageous, and demanding work to save thousands of lives.
"When we have a lot of cases, I don't look at that as a bad thing," the president said. "I look at that in a certain respect as being a good thing, because it means our testing is much better.”
The profound danger in Trump's reductio argument lies in its deliberate oversimplification of a complex reality to the point of absurdity. The argument works by exploiting a human cognitive bias: intense hope for simple solutions to complex problems.
Reframe 1: REDEFINITION. Presidents aren’t properly concerned with the meaning of public health data in people’s lives; presidents are properly concerned with the quality of the tools public health workers are using, i.e., are they doing their jobs.
Reframe 2: FALSE EQUIVALENCE. Trump's statement performs a calculated misdirection. When confronted with rising COVID-19 case numbers, he redirects attention from the concerning public health data to praise the sophistication of the testing system. This creates a false equivalence between detecting a problem and solving it.
Reframe 3: DISTORTION OF CAUSE/EFFECT: Trump deliberately confuses cause and effect of the problem. Improved testing capabilities did allow us to detect infection with the virus (cause of the problem), and reduced hospitalization and death (effects of the cause). Trump shifts attention away from the virus (cause) to “testing” (tool); he refocuses attention from hospitalization and death (effect) to “administrative achievement” (effect). The argument isn't really about COVID-19 at all; it's about controlling the narrative. When Trump says "Makes us look bad," he reveals that the true concern is image management, not public health.
What makes this reductio particularly insidious is that it doesn't just fail logically. It succeeds rhetorically by offering an emotionally satisfying alternative to confronting an uncomfortable reality. It provides a way to reject unwelcome facts not by disputing them directly, but by undermining the very process by which we come to know them. This is why simply pointing out the logical fallacies misses the deeper significance of the argument's structure and its appeal. The implausibility is not a flaw in the argument.
It is the argument.
So, if we were testing a million people instead of 14 million people, we would have far few cases, right?
"So, I view it as a badge of honor. Really, it's a badge of honor," he added. "It's a great tribute to the testing and all of the work that a lot of professionals have done."
Days later, the U.S. recorded 100,000 known deaths from COVID-19.
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