After facing off against Donald Trump in June, President Joe Biden explained his poor debate performance in part by telling reporters, “It’s hard to debate a liar.” He had a point—by one estimate, Trump made more than 30 false claims that night, on everything from Roe v. Wade and January 6 to China, taxes, and, depending on who you ask, his own golf game.
In fact, there’s a name for Trump’s apparent tactic: The “Gish Gallop.” The term refers to a rhetorical strategy of, basically, overwhelming your opponent with false or incoherent information. As Robert Talisse, a professor of philosophy and political science at Vanderbilt University and co-author of the book Why We Argue (And How We Should): A Guide to Political Disagreement in an Age of Unreason, describes it, to employ the Gish Gallop is “to paralyze and immobilize the dialectical opponent by just burying him or her in a morass of bad arguments and empirically questionable claims.” As a result, the opponent can’t address all of the claims at once, or get to any prepared remarks—making it appear as if the “Gish Galloper” has won the debate.
The name comes from creationist Duane Gish, who frequently took on scientists in evolutionary debates in the 1980s and 90s. National Center for Science Education director Eugenie Scott coined the term, writing in 1994 that the formal debate format meant “the evolutionist has to shut up while the creationist gallops along, spewing out nonsense with every paragraph.”
To see what she means, here’s a clip of Gish from the early ’80s. He goes on at about the 24-minute mark:
Knowingly or not, four decades later, Trump appears to have embraced the same tactic. “Like Gish before him, Trump ceaselessly repeats claims that have been publicly discredited,” journalist Mehdi Hasan argued in the Atlantic last year in an excerpt of his book, Win Every Argument: The Art of Debating, Persuading, and Public Speaking. “Trump owes much of his political success to this tactic—and to the fact that so few people know how to beat it.”
To better understand the Gish Gallop’s little-known history, how to identify it, and strategies for defeating it, I called Professor Talisse for a rundown ahead of the Kamala Harris-Donald Trump debate.
Read an edited and condensed version of our conversation below:
Does the Gish Gallop function differently in political debates, compared to debates about evolution?
When we’re talking about politics, we’re almost always talking about political identities and partisan affiliations. In the case of evolutionary biology, with the original Gish Gallop, there was an element of identity, too. The debaters were affiliated with either a certain kind of religious identity or an identity that takes itself to be enlightened and more scientific. So in that respect, the original Gish Gallop context is similar to the context of political debates, where part of what the Gish Galloper is doing is trying to give his allies the experience of seeing somebody on their side “own” the other side, to use a bit of internet lingo.
“As Steve Bannon called it, ‘flooding the zone [with shit].””
And “owning” the other side has almost nothing to do with having a better command of the facts. Owning just means overcoming. Especially in presidential debates, political debating is really just a competition among the two debaters for the headlines the next day, for the soundbite, and for the clip that’s going to get a million views on social media.
It is not a logical thing. It’s not a rational thing. It’s not even about staying on topic. As Steve Bannon called it, “flooding the zone [with shit],” right? The political variant of the Gish Gallop is to say so much stuff that is objectionable to the other side that your interlocutor gets paralyzed by the sheer quantity of things to object to. And even in that case, the interlocutor has been taken off his or her own messaging.
So it’s a two-pronged strategy: One purpose is to simply overwhelm your opponent, so they don’t know which thing to respond to—
Right, they don’t know which ball to swing at.
—and then secondly, the opponent can’t bring up their own points, whatever they were hoping to talk about.
Yes. And one other aspect of this that I think is a little bit less often noticed: Part of the Gish Gallop is also about controlling what will be talked about by ordinary citizens the next day. Will it be some candidate’s policy proposal, or will it be one candidate saying, “There you go again,” like Reagan did, right? Will it be the zinger, or will it be something of substance?
One of the more distressing features of democracy under the technological conditions we live in—social media, 24/7 news—is that a lot of our politics are wrapped up in controlling the topics of conversation among friends and families and coworkers. For every moment one spends on the day after the debate saying, “Could you believe what Harris said?” or “Can you believe what Trump said?” is time not talking about an issue that might be more substantive, like the facts about immigration, or the facts about school shootings.
If Trump deployed the tactic at the debate on Tuesday, how might viewers recognize it?
I think it’s increasingly a tactic, this variant mutation of the Gish Gallop. What we’re seeing now, particularly from Trump, are that his statements increasingly involve a string of unrelated thoughts, each of which typically leaves somebody scratching their head—like sharks and batteries and claims that he understands nuclear energy because he has an uncle who taught at MIT. The claim is, on its face, kind of absurd in a way that you have to wonder, what could he possibly mean by that? And the more time you spend wondering is time you’re not spending thinking about other things.
“[Trump’s] statements increasingly involve a string of unrelated thoughts, each of which typically leaves somebody scratching their head.”
So what I would recommend to my fellow citizens who are invested in presidential politics is to read the transcript—not watch the debate. When we listen to somebody speak, especially if we’re well-disposed to them, we tend to cognize—what we’ve heard tends to be a lot more coherent than what’s actually coming out of the mouth of the speaker. Once you realize that the Gish Gallop is part of a strategy, I think the right inoculation is to start reading the transcripts and not trying to make sense of what’s being said [on live television].
But aren’t you losing something by not seeing all the information conveyed through things like gestures and facial expressions and tone?
Yeah, that’s the cost, right? There’s no silver bullet here. But in my view, knowing that this tactic is so prominent and so central to modern debating strategies, reading the transcripts, even after you’ve watched the live event, elucidates a lot of things.
If you’re really interested in making sure you get the whole thing, watch the debate and then read the transcript. Take note of how your impression of the event changes after you’ve read it. I’m always surprised about how much of what appears in the transcript that I don’t remember hearing. [Editor’s note: You can view a list of presidential debate transcripts dating back to 1960 here.]
For Harris, or anyone who’s debating someone using the Gish Gallop, how do you combat it? How do you beat the Gish?
I’m not a debater myself, but I think the best strategy is calling it out and then trying to get back on topic. Saying, “This is a Gish Gallop. You’ve said eight things, all of which are objectionable. If I had more time, I could give you my objections to all of them. Let me now just respond like this,” and then as quickly as possible, the interlocutor should get back on message. That’s the way to do it.
