When talk of a banana revealed truth
And how today's public officials do their best to obscure it
Sometimes there’s a lesson in how we tell a story — like when a banana warned of economic distress. (Photo by Rodrigo dos Reis on Unsplash)
A corner of the brain called the visual cortex stores not only images but also some of the context surrounding what we remember seeing. That’s apparently why a bunch of bananas has in recent days triggered my heartbroken fixation on the loss of candor, capacity and restraint in American politics.
To understand how we get from brain science to a tropical fruit to politics — a winding path, I concede — we will need to recall the mostly forgotten story of a witty bureaucrat who a half-century ago briefly brought the banana into the national conversation about economics. Maybe after reading this, you too will come to see a banana as not just a banana — for a while, anyway — but rather as a mark of how far our government has fallen from the ideal of honesty and competence that we ought to expect and demand.
My visual cortex jumped into action the other day because, as it happens, a bunch of bananas was poking out of the grocery bag in my car as I was listening to a podcast that laid out details of what people are calling Signalgate — the sloppy inclusion of a prominent journalist in a group chat where, over several days, 18 top Trump administration officials used a non-secure messaging channel to discuss plans for a military strike on Yemen. It was a shocking security breach, though the Trump administration is doing its best to paper over what’s actually a scandal while pretending that it was the journalist who did something wrong.
And so my brain somehow mashed together the sight of those bananas in the bag with Pete Hegseth laying out in a Signal message exactly when the first bombs would fall, and JD Vance complaining that an attack on the Houthis was “bailing out Europe again” — since it’s mainly European shipping lanes that the Houthi attacks have been disrupting — to which the square-jawed and abundantly-tattooed Pentagon chief eagerly agreed, “I fully share your loathing of European free-loading. It’s PATHETIC.”1
Actually, “pathetic” is an apt description of the hypocrisy that excuses this awful incompetence, as the White House has done, since this is a crowd that vilified Hillary Clinton for the much less consequential act of using a private email server. Clinton never disclosed battle plans that might have enabled eavesdropping enemies to blow American pilots out of the sky, you know, as Hegseth did; she did not suggest that the president she served didn’t understand the issue at hand, as Vance did.
Unfortunately for Clinton — and fortuitously for the Trump Amateur Hour Signal Corps — control of Congress often determines the consequences of ineptitude in the executive branch. So the relevant committee chairs in the House and Senate so far seem disinclined to do anything much about Signalgate. Plus, the eager Trump tub-thumpers of Fox News are uninterested in reporting anything critical of Hegseth, their former weekend host colleague, or anybody else involved in the right-wing administration that was brought to us by the most damaging immigrant in American history, Rupert Murdoch. (Where was Trump’s wall when we needed it?)
But let’s not forget the journalist who illuminated all this: Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of The Atlantic. We ought to note his admirable restraint in not immediately publishing what he had uncovered until he was sure it wasn’t a hoax and wouldn’t endanger national security. But that didn’t stop White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt from calling him an “anti-Trump hater” — mild criticism, perhaps, in the context of her boss’s prior labeling of Goldberg as a “sleazebag,” “con man” and “slimeball reporter.” (Sidenote: How far we’ve come from the shock of discovering on the Watergate tapes that a president might speak coarsely.) From the MAGA point of view, one would think that failing to notice such a notorious figure in a consequential conversation about sending American forces into battle would draw at least a scolding from the boss. Trump seems to lack the guts.
But the president wants to say less about this, clearly expecting the story to blow over. And he may be right, if only because it’s hard for news consumers to keep track of the daily outrages emanating from the 47thpresidency. To note a few in the days after the Signal story broke: Trump announced an inflationary 25 percent tariff on cars and auto parts imported from Mexico and Canada; Vance and his wife traveled, uninvited and unwelcome, to Greenland, which Trump has threatened to take by force; Trump extorted $100 million worth of free legal work from an elite law firm to avoid an executive order punishing it for prior representation; the administration cancelled funding for dozens of studies into potential vaccines for future pandemics; federal agents seized foreign-born graduate students at Tufts and the University of Alabama in a further crackdown on free speech.
All of those actions, you may note, depend upon an expansive view of presidential power — a remarkable shift for an administration of the Republican party, which once advocated limited government and raised voluble defense of the Constitution. A president calling for global expansion — to give America control not only of Greenland, but also Canada, the Panama Canal and Gaza — is at odds with even Trump’s own campaign calls for withdrawing America from foreign conflicts. Trump’s protectionism sharply diverges from the historic Republican advocacy for free trade, which was party orthodoxy from at least the time of Ronald Reagan’s presidency.2 Reagan, we might note, also opposed a border wall and advocated amnesty over deportation for undocumented immigrants.3
Which underscores how radical the Trump regime is, rather than truly conservative, and how widely its incompetence is spread. All of this stands in sharp contrast to the man who brought the banana to the discussion of economic policy, which you surely recall is how we began this conversation.
If Americans in the 1970s had been able to peer forward to the presidential campaign of 2024, they might have been envious of the economic record that the Biden administration brought to voters. It would surprise them, surely, to imagine that many pundits would blame inflation for the Democrats’ narrow loss to Donald Trump, because the reality of inflation 50 years ago was quite a bit more harsh than today’s.
It's not that high prices weren’t a justifiable concern for American voters last year, with the inflation rate during Biden’s four years in office averaging 4.95 percent. It’s just that by historical standards, that’s not so high: It is just 0.27 percent higher than the average inflation rate during Ronald Reagan’s presidency, more than a full point below inflation during the term of Richard Nixon and two points less than inflation during Gerald Ford’s short tenure. But of all the presidents since World War II, it was Jimmy Carter who wrestled with the highest average inflation rate: 9.85 percent.4
Carter had come into office after the lethal mix of stagnant growth and inflation — the portmanteau is “stagflation” — that had led Nixon to impose wage and price controls. To help him fight the economic battle, Carter turned to a brilliant and blunt Cornell University economist, Alfred Kahn, and asked him to take on the role of what came to be called “inflation czar.” Valedictorian at New York University at age 18, Kahn had earned a doctorate at Yale and then turned to teaching, which he loved in part because of the chance it gave him to engage directly with people and grapple with hard issues to find truth.5
Kahn had for a few years stepped away from Cornell to head utility oversight for New York State, where he had begun a process of deregulation. He had spent the first 16 months of Carter’s term launching airline deregulation as head of the Civil Aeronautics Board, where his work was so effective that it changed approaches to business regulation in other sectors and even other countries. After his death in 2010, The Economist noted that Kahn’s “adventures with airlines led on to the freeing of the trucking, telecoms and power industries.”6
With no bureaucracy reporting to him and only the power of persuasion, Kahn was an unusual force in government. An eager performer — he was a baritone, and loved to sing Gilbert and Sullivan — Kahn was engaging and candid. This sometimes got him in hot water. Asked once by a reporter if he could defend the size of the defense budget, he replied with a single word: “No.” He conceded that his projection for economic growth “isn’t worth the air it rides on.” When he called Arab oil producers “schnooks” in the middle of the oil embargo, the White House made him retract it.
Notably, Kahn couldn’t bring himself to lie to reporters. Late in his life he recalled an incident when he hadn’t responded fully to a journalist’s questions. “And I remember feeling so bad about it,” he said, “that I went back to the reporter and said, ‘I fudged to you, and I'm really sorry because as a rule I never try to mislead anyone.’”
But some remember him most for what happened when he warned honestly that if inflation continued to soar, there was the possibility of “deep, deep depression.” Carter was reported to be furious and to have demanded that Kahn purge “the D-word” from his use. So, Time reported, Kahn began to say instead, “We’re in danger of having the worst banana in 45 years.” 7
Funny. Point made: the man wouldn’t lie for anyone.
Objections quickly came from banana producers — what, they demanded, did bananas have to do with a depression? — prompting Kahn to obligingly change his code word to “kumquat.” He wasn’t trying to hoodwink anybody; he was using humor to make a serious point that he couldn’t bring himself to either ignore or lie about.
Kahn’s government job came to an end when Carter lost the presidency to Ronald Reagan, whose early tenure led to a recession that finally brought prices under control. So America got neither banana nor kumquat, but it lost a truth-teller from public service.
Can anyone imagine a public official like Alfred Kahn nowadays? The fans of Donald Trump cite his engaging speech — which, linguists have noted, has the patter of stand-up comics, and which he often claims is suffused with truths that other people don’t offer.8 But Trump is not “candid” in the sense that Kahn was — that is, not if that term is defined as including “honesty.”
Trump is, in fact, a habitual and relentless liar, at a scale unprecedented in American history. The Washington Post Fact Checker team counted 30,573 false or misleading statements during his first term in office, including 503 on the last day before the 2020 vote. As time went by, he became more unmoored from reality — averaging about six false claims a day in his first year in office, then 16 a day in his second year, 22 in his third year and 39 in his final year.
That impressive record of mendacity seems unlikely to stand, though. He has turned more recently to whoppers, like the myth that immigrants were eating family pets in Ohio. There has been a lot more: Voters did not give him a “massive mandate” (reality: he won by just 1.5 points); 21 million people did not enter the U.S. illegally during Biden’s term (there were only half that many border arrests, many of them people crossing more than once); Trump has not “stopped all government censorship” (tell that to the universities he is bludgeoning); and there was no program to send $100 million worth of condoms to Gaza, a claim Trump made after initially saying the figure was a mere $50 million (the former number, extrapolating Post calculations, would rain 3 billion condoms on an area roughly double the size of Washington).9
Lying so extravagantly on such matters suggests untrustworthiness in any realm. And it has broader effects: The Society for Personality and Social Psychology notes that lying at such scale can erode trust in society generally.10 When seen at the apex of society, lying becomes a more widely accepted practice, leading people to assume that others are lying. That makes it more unlikely that people will trust the institutions of society. And the loss of trust is one way that whole societies break down.
This suggests that the lackadaisical response of Republicans in Congress to the Signalgate fiasco is a result of the casual relationship with truth that has become pervasive in the Trump era. That’s not to say that we didn’t see lying in politics before; political ambition has always been a motivation for exaggeration and falsehood. Under Trump, however, falsity has become foundation for policy.
Thus, U.S. Agency for International Development programs to provide food and vaccines to children in poor countries are abandoned as “misguided and fiscally irresponsible,” and millions will die. Thus, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. promises to “make America healthy again” and then announces plans to cut 20,000 health agency jobs, reflecting his longtime proposals to halt all infectious disease research for eight years and focus on Vitamin A and diet as an alternative to the measles vaccine. Thus, immigrants without documentation are deported to foreign cells under the pretense that they are violent criminals, with no showing of that being true.
And thus officials at government’s highest levels, whose roles entrust them with the task of protecting our lives and our nation’s values, carelessly dabble in a dangerous breach of security, then claim against all evidence that there’s nothing to see here, folks, so keep moving along.
And, really, it’s Europeans who are pathetic?
I often find hope these days more in great fiction than in fact. Consider one of the books that the MAGA faithful love to ban, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, by the native American writer Sherman Alexie. The novel’s protagonist, a middle-schooler trying to fit in, at one point warns himself, “Of course, you can’t lie forever. Lies have short shelf lives. Lies go bad. Lies rot and stink up the joint.”11
Maybe someday the stink of Trump lies and their widespread infection of his cohort will be enough to disgust Americans, and the pushback will bring change. Then, we have to hope, smart and honest people might again show up in public life — like the guy who brought a banana to his discussion of economics, because he couldn’t lie about what he believed. We’ll smile. We will be ready for that day.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/03/25/us/signal-group-chat-text-annotations.html
https://www.cato.org/commentary/didnt-republicans-use-believe-free-trade
https://theconversation.com/republicans-once-championed-immigration-in-the-us-why-has-the-partys-rhetoric-and-public-opinion-changed-so-dramatically-239836
https://www.investopedia.com/us-inflation-rate-by-president-8546447
https://www.cato.org/regulation/spring-2011/alfred-kahn-1917-2010
https://www.economist.com/obituary/2011/01/20/alfred-kahn
https://time.com/archive/6853887/business-yes-we-have-no-bananas/
https://www.npr.org/transcripts/510628831
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/01/29/gaza-condoms-fact-checker-trump/
https://spsp.org/news-center/character-context-blog/consequences-dishonesty
https://www.bannedbooksbookclub.com/library/the-absolutely-true-diary-of-a-part-time-indian
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This essay argues that the pervasive lies of Donald Trump’s administration are infecting politics and society generally. While politics has always spawned mendacity, the current level is unprecedented, and the results dangerous.
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THANK YOU for reading The Upstate American, and for joining us in the conversation about our common ground, this great country. As we together navigate these challenging times, I hope you’ll join us again next week — or send me a message with ideas you’d like to see us address.
-Rex Smith