The Gaslighting of America, with Professor Mathias Risse

KEVIN MALONEY: Our guest today on the Values & Interests podcast is Mathias Risse. Mathias is a professor of human rights, global affairs, and philosophy at Harvard University, and he is also director of the Carr-Ryan Center for Human Rights. Mathias is a prolific writer and researcher and is a regular contributor to our journal at Carnegie Council, Ethics & International Affairs. He is also the co-host of an excellent podcast called Justice Matters, which I highly recommend everybody take a listen to.

Mathias recently wrote a piece for our journal on the concept of “gaslighting,” a concept that is prolific now in American foreign and domestic policy. In today’s conversation I unpack with Mathias what gaslighting is, what it means, and its impact on America as a democracy and how it speaks to the rest of the world. I hope you enjoy today’s conversation, and let’s get right into it.

Mathias Risse, thank you so much for joining me on the Values & Interests podcast today.

MATHIAS RISSE: Good to be here.

KEVIN MALONEY: You focus on political philosophy at Harvard. You also focus on this intersection of I would say politics in practice and human rights. This is a sweet spot for us at Carnegie Council. We look at the moral dimensions of international relations and think about this from a values and interests equation.

What I like to do with our guests is not detach that equation and go right to the academic or policy side but to give our listeners a sense of who we are speaking to from a values perspective. I would love to hear a little bit about your values formation, your own personal background, and how you think about your own moral framework in the world today.

MATHIAS RISSE: You are starting off with deep questions.

KEVIN MALONEY: That is why we have the philosopher here.

MATHIAS RISSE: That really is a deep question. I am working as a political philosopher. I am doing it at the Kennedy School of Public Policy, where people are thinking about what happens in the world, the political domain, and the policy space. Political philosophy is also trying to make the policy space and politics better.

This requires a bit of value grounding. For me the deeper background is that I grew up in Germany in a working-class family in a Catholic context. The Catholic context I shed at some point, so I am definitely a lapsed Catholic at this stage, but the values orientation runs very deep, so my values orientation has become secularized.

At some point this values orientation was enriched by philosophical inquisitiveness, and that philosophical inquisitiveness was then applied to the political domain, and years later I am the director of the Human Rights Center at the Harvard Kennedy School. That is a rough perspective.

KEVIN MALONEY: That was very succinct. I am also from a Catholic background and went to a Jesuit university. I am no longer practicing, but there is a strong thread of values, especially in terms of the Jesuit tradition that I have taken into what I would call my more “agnostic” work at Carnegie Council. That is a longer conversation for another time between two former Catholics.

You recently wrote a piece for Carnegie Council, and this is the meat of the conversation today. The piece you wrote for our academic journal, Ethics & International Affairs, explored the conception, which I would like to have you delineate for our audience here, of gaslighting and gaslighting as a means of political leadership in the current moment within the United States.

For our listeners I thought it would be good to start by defining what you mean by gaslighting and then giving a high-level framework of what you talked about in the article. Then I would like to dig into that from a practical side in terms of U.S. politics right now.

MATHIAS RISSE: A little bit of background to that. I have long been thinking about how to make sense of especially Donald Trump’s rhetoric but also a very common rhetorical style we find especially among people around him but then also elsewhere in the American political spectrum as well as elsewhere in the world.

That style is to basically accuse opponents of violations of certain norms that in this context everybody seems to be beholden to—democratic norms, human rights norms, rule of law norms—when in fact it is you who is violating them. That is a rhetorical move that we see quite a bit, and paradigmatically in Trump’s own context he is constantly accusing the Democrats around Joe Biden of stealing elections, when in fact it is him who has tried to steal an election because he could not put up with the fact that he was beaten fair and square by an enormous margin by Joe Biden in 2020.

He does this all the time, and people around him do this all the time. The word “gaslighting” is in the air. A lot of people talk about gaslighting, which tells you something also about the times we are living in, that people seem to find this everywhere, and this word has had an enormous uptick in the past ten years. Gaslighting has something to do with manipulating and persuading somebody, and it always involves a kind of besmirching and belittling.

The classic case of gaslighting, where this actually comes from, is a scenario where a husband is constantly doubting his wife’s judgment, so she says something, and he says: “Oh, you are just imagining this. This is not real.” He wants to persuade her of something, namely that this judgment is not real, and it involves a belittling or besmirching of her capacities. That is a core concept of gaslighting.

People have applied this all over the place. Other political theorists have applied this to the political context, and I have seen a certain creation of epistemic dependencies—Eric Beerbohm and Ryan Davis have argued this way—where a person is creating a context where the audience basically is becoming increasingly dependent on the gaslighter as a sole source of information and increasingly losing the capacity to make up their own minds.

There are a lot of users of gaslighting, and in this context I gave my initial observations about these rhetorical phenomena that I have been observing for a long time. I decided then to also develop a notion that in the article I call “political gaslighting as a leadership style.”

That leadership style is what I already sketched, namely that you are in a political domain, you are attacking your opponents, you are attributing to them certain norm violations, and you want to persuade your audience that it is these opponents who are the norm violators and that it requires your rescue efforts to secure the polity, when in fact it is the other way around.

KEVIN MALONEY: That is a great overview. There are a lot of directions I want to go in.

The first one is something that you mention in the article and you alluded to here, which is gaslighting as political leadership. One of the things in the article that was intriguing to me is how the use of gaslighting influences the polity or influences the American electorate in general in terms of what they view a leader as being. Can you push on that a little bit in terms of not only for its political efficacy but also how its usage is changing the DNA of American politics.

MATHIAS RISSE: A good way of getting at that question is to ask: If you have your dreams of a leader, what do we need leaders for? What is the purpose of leaders, and that is another conception I am using in this article, namely “adaptive leadership.” This is an understanding of leadership where we need somebody to make us see challenges that our society goes through and enables us to recognize these challenges and motivating us to deal with them.

That is what one is hoping for in political leadership. Contrast that with gaslighting. If this is a dominant theme in political leadership, then the work of democracy, the leadership that we need in a democracy, simply does not get done because gaslighting is about leadership keeping itself in circulation and keeping itself in prominence by besmirching others.

That is not a way of solving problems. It is just failing in a very elementary way in terms of getting the work of democracy done and instead replacing that with an effort to score points in a populist manner and remaining popular, remaining in circulation, and remaining electable, but we are not getting anywhere in terms of actually solving problems.

KEVIN MALONEY: From a Carnegie Council perspective, it goes to the heart of the difference between moral leadership and political leadership and thinking about that as a concentric circle at different points in U.S. history and how those concentric circles might overlap.

The interesting point of gaslighting, at least from my perspective, and you point this out, is that values have always played an important role in the rhetoric of politicians, but now there are these two variables that you talk about. There is an attempt to replace a liberal value system at the heart of this rhetoric, and then there is the disingenuous, bad-faith rejection of empirical truth that is this new insidious slice of the rhetorical pie.

That is how I am seeing it in my own research and after reading your piece. Feel free to react, say I’m wrong, and push me on that. Seeing how these pieces are connected in a strategic manner even if the rhetoric seems a bit off the cuff or a bit brazen, it is a hard ecosystem when it is coming at you in such a brazen and kinetic manner.

MATHIAS RISSE: A major theme in my work in the last year or so is to make sense from a philosophical point of view what is happening to this country. How can we describe basically this democratic self-subversion that the United States is currently in, particularly in the period since the second inauguration of Trump and now moving to the midterms.

I have been rolling out some vocabulary about this to articulate a philosophical diagnosis of this, and political gaslighting is part of this. I have another notion I have not published yet, but it is something I have been developing with a co-author who is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Government named Soren Dudley. We have been looking at this in terms of a wrestling analogy.

In wrestling there is the term “kayfabe.” Do you know this? I had nothing to do with wrestling before, and Soren made me see that there is a lot to learn.

Wrestling is much more of a spectator affair than a real athletic competition, where it is open-ended who wins. So, there is drama, there are characters, and they do certain things. It is typically prearranged and has a certain continuity. Basically, it reflects a fantasy world. We always have to stay with that. It has its internal logic. We are not breaking kayfabe.

Much in American politics really is like that, at least what Trump and his people are doing, that is roiling me because you often wonder if they really believe that the election was stolen. Once you see this in terms of the kayfabe analogy, the question does not quite arise because that is basically the storyline they are inhabiting. At this stage, breaking kayfabe is a rule violation, so the question, “Do you really believe that?” is something that does not come to them, but it has a lot of illuminating power for American politics, especially given their—Trump and the people around him—grounding in the world of professional wrestling.

KEVIN MALONEY: As a child of America in the 1990s, the World Wrestling Federation’s heyday, I will look forward to reading that piece.

Of course, I am sure you are exploring this maybe tangentially in the piece, but the irony does not escape me that the McMahons are aligned very closely to the power of “Trumpworld” and that the storytelling mechanisms they have used are in the political arena now.

MATHIAS RISSE: Exactly.

KEVIN MALONEY: You mention this ecosystem that exists now in terms of Trumpworld. I think there obviously has always been this relationship between power and serving in government, but then there is also this values dynamic, and a lot of that has been pulled from a liberal tradition.

On the Trump side of things, whether it is cabinet members or having crypto bros over for a $50,000-a-plate dinner, the transactionalism seems to be—and again, this goes to gaslighting—so blatant that it has shifted the norms so much. You have this social contract around transactionalism: “I am going to go with this rhetorical point. I am going to spew this lie because I know what I am going to get out of it.”

It is very blatant and blunt: “I am going to benefit monetarily from this, I am going to benefit in terms of position, I am going to be able to trade on this information, et cetera.”

What is your reaction to the insertion of this blatant transactionalism into American public life, and how have you thought about that?

MATHIAS RISSE: All your diagnoses there are completely right. It is a remarkable change compared to the traditional political scenery. You characterized this nicely. Politics generally and certainly American politics, both domestic and foreign policy, has always been a typical mélange of power-driven ambition, but the value orientation was very real.

If you look at the presidential history of the United States, there is a values dimension. Ronald Reagan had a strong values dimension. Both Bushes had a recognizable value dimension, and currently with Donald Trump this is completely missing. There is simply no “there” there when it comes to the values domain. It is just “the show must go on,” the kayfabe, the self-projection, and the transactional character.

The defining theme of the transactions here, the coherence of Trump 2.0—and this is a massive difference to Trump 1.0, which had coherence—comes from the fact that you can only be a major person in the Trump administration if you are supporting that gaslighting move about the stolen election. That is the litmus test that you need to pass.

That of course also tells you, what kind of person would do that? What kind of value commitments are we expecting from people who are willing to basically throw overboard everything they have known about Donald Trump before in order to get to power in this way?

I think the first two years of Trump 2.0 will be studied for decades to come in political practice and theory. I am hoping that we will get out of this and have the opportunity to study it.

KEVIN MALONEY: My own Ph.D. project is focused on some of what you just laid out, so I am sure I will be reading your stuff for years to come on that front.

We alluded to this contract, this permission structure, in terms of if you are in the halls of power now, X, Y, and Z are requirements. One of the interesting points for me in terms of my research has been looking at the constellation of individuals around Trump in this second administration.

There is this contract, as you said, around a certain, I wouldn’t call it a value system, but a system that says: “This is what is acceptable; the other thing is not.” But if you look at Vance versus Rubio versus Stephen Miller versus Hegseth, they each have this competing and complementary value system within MAGA. They all have their different versions of gaslighting and what they like to lean into.

One of the sparks for my project was this piece that you wrote on the Munich Security Conference in 2025, where Vance gave this speech around liberal values, the defense of Western values, and what that really means. That was a watershed moment in terms of U.S. foreign policy rhetoric. I would love to hear your thoughts on that moment and what that meant for you and your own research.

MATHIAS RISSE: That was a big moment, and I was fortunate enough to be at the Munich Security Conference. I had never been invited before, and for whatever reason they invited me in 2025, so I was actually there when he gave that speech.

It was absolutely dramatic. Everybody expected Vance to be there and explain to all these foreign policy hotshots that come to the Munich Security Conference every year what the Trump 2.0 administration’s attitude toward Ukraine would be. That was the top point on the agenda.

Vance goes on stage and says: “Look, I know you think I am going to talk about Ukraine, but Ukraine isn’t actually your biggest problem. There are no external threats at all that are your biggest problem. Your biggest problem is that you are basically—you guys, you here in the audience—the problem because you are oppressing the free speech endeavors of your democratic populations because you are imposing constraints on free speech, limiting in particular right-wing politics in terms of what it can say.”

Of course, what is in the background there is regulation that is standard in European countries running from the Nazi years about the presentation of lies and misleading statements in public and rallying people behind causes and gaslighting. There is actually legislation, certainly in Germany, where this was happening, against this style of politics.

JD Vance stands there and says: “The biggest problem that you guys have is that you are imposing these restraints on democratic expressions of opinion,” when the reason for these constraints is to protect democratic discourse basically from charlatans and manipulators and hard-won lessons in the European context. In one of the suburbs is Dachau concentration camp, which JD Vance toured the day before he gave that speech. It is because places like Dachau could arise in Germany that Germany now has this kind of legislation.

JD Vance stands there and says basically, “What you are doing is imposing Soviet-style constraints on discourse, Soviet-era political oppression on what your electorate wants to do.” You could hear the gasping everywhere in the building because people were so shocked.

It was in response to that that I wrote my first piece on gaslighting because that was a gaslighting move. He was standing there, pointing the finger at these democratic and military leaders and accusing them of doing something, namely oppressing free expression, when that same week the headlines were full of the White House excluding the press from asking questions and imposing all sorts of constraints. If you were not calling the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America you were no longer allowed in the press room. It is classic gaslighting; he is accusing a group of people of doing something that he himself is doing.

KEVIN MALONEY: Super-interesting. When I first read the speech it was a jaw-open moment. I was not in the room.

One of the framing devices, and I think you alluded to it in your piece as well, is this kind of ethical or moral Trojan Horse, saying, “I am taking this moral stance,” but it is really to replace one value system with another: “We are criticizing liberal values, and my prescription, although I am disguising it as a Western prescription, is an illiberal one at the end of the day.”

Two of our fellows a few years ago focused on artificial intelligence (AI) and wrote a piece in 2022 about the “ethical Trojan Horse of long-termism and utilitarianism” in regard to transhumanism and conversations around AI. They were giving this moral framework that people could feel good about and feel sophisticated about and swallow, and really the end goal was oligarchy and transhumanism.

I think it is important to call a spade a spade on these types of things, but the obfuscation of fact can be dizzying for us, who are focused on this on a day-in-day-out basis, let alone the person who is working X, Y, or Z job and who isn’t focused on this stuff. The cognitive dissonance around that is challenging enough for me, but what are your thoughts on that in terms of the more general polity and what a prescription for that might be or way of framing it at a more public level?

MATHIAS RISSE: You raised a lot of interesting points. For one thing, we see some very basic challenges about democracies here, especially in large territorial states like the United States, where it is hard to maintain connectivity to governance in the first place. There are 330 million people in the United States. For them to see themselves as in something together is hard with the very checkered history this nation has had and all the different groups, but also to have connectivity to the people who are doing the governing in the Capitol on the East Coast. It is hard to keep people interested in politics and motivate them to make up their minds and be inquisitive in thorough ways is incredibly difficult for these structural reasons, and then life is hard for people just to make ends meet.

This is a serious structure challenge to the viability of a democratic polity over time, something of this size. The nation is turning 250 years old on the anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, and we are way overdue in a way for a massive onslaught on democratic institutions given how hard it is to maintain them in a large structure like this.

KEVIN MALONEY: I have been watching pretty closely the narratives emerging around the 250th anniversary, and it is definitely a flashpoint in terms of different visions of the United States.

It has also been interesting to see traditional allies from a geopolitical perspective. You are starting to see the conferences pop up on “250 years’ relationship with the United States” and them navigating that now as maybe an avenue of soft-power engagement that does not feel as acidic as the day-in and day-out “We’re going to take over Greenland” conversation or “We’re going to bomb Iran today” conversation. It has been interesting.

I think that goes to a big point of struggle for me. It seems to be creating parallel universes, and this goes to gaslighting: “We will engage on the nice, soft-power, 250 stuff, while the United States is doing all this simultaneously.” Squaring that circle is very, very difficult. It has been interesting to watch the spaces. From an academic perspective it has been depressing to watch it simultaneously as an American who grew up here in the 1990s.

I want to pivot the last section of our interview today more positively to the potential prescription you lay out. You focus in the piece on this aspect of, “adaptive leadership,” as a potential counter even at a high level to gaslighting. Maybe we could return to that and you can lay out your thesis for this adaptive leadership and why it might be effective as a countering mechanism.

MATHIAS RISSE: Adaptive leadership is not something that I came up with. It is an approach to leadership that was developed here at the Kennedy School by Ronald Heifetz and Marty Linsky over time. It is basically one of the signature pedagogical moves that the Kennedy School has been making over the decades. It is a big production at the Kennedy School to teach leadership in that spirit.

Some people teach it differently. It is not the only approach to leadership, but it has also generated a lot of following around the world, so a lot of people think of leadership in this way.

There are some key ideas to that. One key idea is that this approach understands leadership by way of contrast with both power and authority. It is not about inhabiting particular positions of authority and it is not about being in positions where you are already wielding power, so it is not the “great man” theory of leadership. The adaptive leader is somebody who manages to create an awareness of something that needs to be done to motivate people to go along and get them to address certain challenges that are coming up.

This leads to the second feature of this approach, that leadership is understood here around a particular kind of problem, namely these adaptive problems. The world is changing, and any kind of entity in a changing world needs to think about how to adapt. It is an analogy taken from biology in particular. Other fields are talking about adaptation. It is an import of that notion to the domain of leadership studies that Heifetz and Linsky did some decades ago.

Circumstances are changing. There are challenges for companies. Car companies need to adjust to reality, where a lot of things are done electrically and electronically. Countries need to adapt to a new foreign policy. The rest of the world needs to adapt to America being a different place. Families have adaptive challenges. It is a particular kind of problem.

The third feature of this approach to leadership is that it is not only about character features and the kind of person you are but also practices that can be learned, taught, and implemented.

We discussed this earlier; there are built-in democratic credentials to this. The work of democracy is for people to move along and tackle challenges that come up and take a certain level of responsibility, obviously suitably adjusted to the fact that they are all individuals and leading often challenging lives, but it is an understanding of leadership that is precisely not waiting to see what the big guy says. A particular big guy may say lots of things that have little to do with reality.

One domain where this contrast matters profoundly is if you think about climate change. Climate change is one of the biggest adaptive challenges in the world in the 21st century.

Globally this has been recognized. The United States recognized this, especially under Biden massively, so it is a massive adaptive challenge. How do we adjust to rising sea levels, all sorts of weird weather pattern changes, more droughts, more storms, and more flooding? How do we adjust to that in terms of infrastructure and as individuals in terms of how things work around us? It is a massive adaptive challenge.

The second Trump administration basically says this is all a big hoax, so we are basically doing the opposite of what adaptive leadership suggests here. We are canceling perceptions of the problem, we are penalizing people who take it seriously, and upending the careers of people who devote themselves to this, but of course the adaptive challenge here is very real, and it just means that it will be a whole lot harder for subsequent generations to deal with this.

KEVIN MALONEY: There are many parallels across American life right now in terms of that desire to redefine the problem as nonexistent and then demonize any regulation in relation to that or any prescriptions from a public policy or spending perspective. You see this on AI regulation: “AI regulation is a European thing, and the Europeans can’t innovate, and the Europeans are dying and their Western values are disappearing, but we don’t do that here.”

You can extrapolate that out through a number of industries in the United States right now. It has been “interesting” to think about. Listeners to the podcast will remember that I interviewed a moral philosopher from Johns Hopkins named Travis Rieder, and he wrote this great book, Catastrophe Ethics: How to Choose Well in a World of Tough Choices, and it goes through a lot of the problems you were talking about, again on the individual level.

Just as a reminder to listeners, specifically he talked about the problem of nihilism around climate: “If it is inevitable, what is my personal moral responsibility to help address the situation if it is a system-level problem?” I highly recommend people go back and read Travis’ book, but if you have not read it, it is a great read.

I always like to close these interviews in terms of what we talked about on the day, but what can listeners do if they want to dig deeper? Who are you reading right now? This could be past historians and philosophers, et cetera, but if people are really looking into this issue of gaslighting and looking into values within foreign policy and within American democracy, are there any authors, papers, or shows that you recommend so we can dig into it a little bit more?

MATHIAS RISSE: If I may be somewhat immodest about this, since you started this off by saying if people are interested in what we are talking about here, I have quite dramatically changed my own way of being an intellectual in the last year. I have put out lots of commentaries, which are all on the Carr-Ryan Center’s website. They are commentaries that are designed to make sense of what is happening to this country.

That is where I am developing this vocabulary, gaslighting, the kayfabe analogy, and I am taking a term from Herbert Marcuse, “repressive tolerance.” I think we live in an era now of “vindictive tolerance,” which is a social system that nominally is committed to values like democracy, rule of law, and civil and human rights, but you are going after opponents in a system like that by constantly casting people who are opponents within the system as opponents of the system.

It is people who are supporting diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives who they say are undermining fairness, equality, and integrity. It is people who are asking for a sound historical reckoning with the American past on the occasion of its 250th anniversary and accusing them of undermining the integrity of the system. Vindictive tolerance means that the system is nominally tolerant, but you are going with a vengeance after people who are opponents within the system and undermining the integrity of a diversity of opinions.

I am trying to develop this vocabulary, and it is also merging into a book project now. It is very immodest to draw attention to my own work, but I want people to be there with me to try to make sense of what is happening.

KEVIN MALONEY: I will double your recommendation. The Carr-Ryan Center site is great.

I have to comment on what you said. I agree. There is also a layer to it that we have been thinking a lot about at the Council, as a convener and as a publisher, in terms of engaging with current political powers.

We think about this as this “pluralistic sandbox.” If you are willing to play within that sandbox and you see that system as both an end and a means, anybody of any political stripe can be a part of that, but as soon as you want to blow up the sandbox, if you want to use what is in that to get to a non-pluralistic end goal, then this is the red line. This goes directly to our values and principles here.

Ethics obviously is not always black and write; there is a lot of gray area to get through there. But this goes to this ethical conundrum that we think a lot about the Council, which is good faith versus bad faith. There can be people having very strong good-faith criticisms of others within a pluralistic system, and you cannot look into people’s souls, but it seems—and I think this is what you are alluding to—there is a lot of bad faith going on right now. I think the dynamic or the norm around acceptability of those types of tactics has changed significantly in the past ten years. This is something I am researching but we are also very concerned about here at the Council.

MATHIAS RISSE: I completely agree.

KEVIN MALONEY: This has been a fantastic interview. I cannot recommend to listeners enough to follow the Carr-Ryan Center, follow the professor’s work, and hopefully we will have you physically at the Council at some point in the future to give a talk and meet our community.

MATHIAS RISSE: That would be lovely. Thank you.