by Ruth A. Sheets
We hear and read a lot about Trump's "Big Lie" these days. We are regularly reminded that this is unprecedented, and it is, but it is still a lie. The "big lie" is a betrayal of the trust of the American people and a forced complicity among Republicans who actually know it is a lie, but to fit in, they must swear to it. The Lie is the story of a former president who can't let go of the power he believes he obtained fairly, deserves, and was cheated out of in the 2020 election. Of course Trump is a liar in every way, but it is important to remember that Trump's lying and Trumpian Republicans did not spring from nowhere and nothing. The "Big Lie" and the January 6th insurgency it engendered have been brewing for decades
A beginning can be seen in the anti-New Dealers of the 1930s and beyond, calling the New Deal Communist and a variety of other false names, trying to sink the programs that were rescuing families and workers from the worst of the Great Depression. The claim was the programs would bankrupt the country, and worse. Since Republican officials were doing well, they dismissed the suffering of their desperate fellow citizens as just an unfortunate temporary setback. (I'd rather think this than that they just didn't care.)
Republican political lying stayed somewhat under the radar during WWII, but after the war, Republican activists tried to bring down the New Deal by lying about the programs' effectiveness. For example, they targeted unions calling their union-busting Taft-Hartley Act "Right to Work." Naming things exactly opposite of what they are/do is a continuing Republican practice – The "Freedom Caucus" strategizes to take away rights like voting from people they dismiss, to insure Republicans will stay in power. Freedom for whom? Perhaps, freedom from accountability for themselves?
Joe McCarthy, Republican Senator from Wisconsin, in the 1950s, destroyed many people's lives with his lies and only a rare few Republicans said anything for fear he would go after them. McCarthy and Trump have a few obvious things in common: lying regularly, blaming people for things with no evidence, holding blank folders or papers pretending they contain names of the accused or other important information, being power-hungry narcissists. His lying brought McCarthy down but not until a lot of people's lives were permanently damaged. Trump's lying has only gotten him voted out of office, so far.
It is important to remember that Democrats can lie too. Some Democrats joined Republicans in lying during WWII about the danger posed by people of Japanese descent in this country, and forced 120,000 of them into "internment" camps in some of the worst places that could be found in this country to imprison them, even American citizens! President Lyndon Johnson and his team lied about staying involved in Vietnam reiterating and expanding the lies of the Eisenhower Administration's belief in our need to fight Communists there. The Dems could have said "no" to the lies.
Richard Nixon honed Republican lying and surrounded himself
with liars. He did some good things during his administration, like
establishing the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and resuming relations
with China and the Soviet Union, but the lies were mixed in, and ultimately
drove him from office. It is a positive that Republicans as well as
Democrats called him out on his lying and cover-up, but they should not be seen
as heroes as some want to claim; they were elected officials living their
oaths. Maybe those Republicans look heroic because so few congressional
Republicans today show any courage.
President Gerald Ford decided people didn't need to know what Nixon was really doing and where all the lies led, so pardoned him. Nixon was not held accountable just as Donald Trump will most likely not be. I suspect Nixon's resignation was the product of a deal with Ford and Congressional Republicans.
The lying did not stop after Nixon, it just added targets, particularly women, and women were recruited to do a lot of the lying. Efforts arose to undermine the Civil Rights movement too and lies worked well, just make up stuff, put people in their place, wherever white men wanted them to be.
Ronald Reagan and his crew were somewhat more sophisticated and careful with their lies than Nixon had been. When called out, they whined that either they didn't know or that the accusers were the liars (Iran-Contra and "Trickle Down Economics" for example). Despite his lying, Reagan is often seen as saintly even by some Democrats. I guess if you smile a lot and lie with conviction you can earn a halo.
Starting with Reagan, justices were appointed to the Supreme Court by Republican Presidents who claimed some kind of "Originalist" position (Antonin Scalia for example). "Originalist" justices claim to see the Constitution the way our Founders had planned it and the founders' version of the Constitution somehow anticipated the 20th and 21st centuries. I think of this as a "smart guy" lie disguised to look like a profound truth. It is really a way to defend racist, misogynistic, xenophobic, homophobic and other rights-warping rulings reflecting the justices' own personal beliefs, giving those "beliefs" more weight than they deserve. Liberty and justice for all" for "originalists" meant liberty and justice for rich, gun-toting, Christian white men and corporations.
So many Republicans were sharpening and test-ballooning their lying, even cheating skills during the 1990s it would be impossible to name them all, but Newt Gingrich was a leading practitioner. A serious expansion of the lying occurred under George W. Bush. His intense ignorance allowed some of those smart liars to deceive our nation, lying us into the invasion of Iraq being the most deadly example.
Then, the worst of all things happened for white Republicans, a Black man was legitimately elected president, TWICE! Republicans scrambled to respond, recruiting Donald Trump and others, preparing them for the next phase. There was no certainty in 2009 that trump would ever be a candidate, but he established his Bonafides by lying about President Obama's birth. The Tea Party lied that they were the true inheritors of the American Revolution and a Black president just didn't represent them. Republicans either said nothing to refute these claims or whole-heartedly jumped right in supporting the lies.
Through lying and cheating, Trump got elected and lied in office more than 30,000 times according to dependable media sources. Some of his biggest lies came after he was voted out of office, when he should have been put out to pasture. The Republican Party with few exceptions, a year and a half later repeats Trump's big lie every day along with uncounted new lies. The groundwork has been carefully laid over decades, so it is no surprise to me that 85% of Republicans say they believe Trump's "big lie" and all the other lies Republicans have been pushing to their falsehood-addicted base. Most of that base has been carefully trained to believe all the lies, all their lives, and to faithfully follow the Republican Liar in Chief, whoever he is and wherever he leads, even if he is inept and hardly functioning.
Lying, since Trump entered the campaign for president in 2015 has been ubiquitous even in the "mainstream" media. The perpetrators of the lies "plant" them somewhere, perhaps social media, perhaps Fox "News," and by evening they are in the nightly news as facts or claims that must be refuted, of course, after they have been carefully stated. It may be too late to stop that practice because the liars cleverly create situations they can slip the lies into so they are sure to be repeated and covered. Even if the reporter says it is not true, it is out there and the base can say "see, the media claims it isn't true, but they wouldn't tell the truth about that anyway."
The media does have themselves partially to blame though, because when Trump and other candidates blatantly lied, the media would not even say the word "lie." They even had trouble with "not true" and "falsehood." They did manage a "not verified" or "no evidence of that yet" now and then. Things have improved somewhat, but the damage has been done and will take a lot of concentrated effort to correct. The lying continues at full speed and nearly everything for Republicans deserves a lie or ten, and the "base" will believe it all, and that base is being courted by willing liars.
I wonder, can the dependence on lies by Republicans be reversed and a major political party saved from disaster both for themselves and for our nation? Remember, political lies are mesmerizing. They temp people to believe they are getting some kind of private knowledge that makes them special and worthy of something, even if the receiver of the lie does not know what that something is. They belong to an exclusive club, in this case mostly white, straight, and Christian.
So, is this Republican Party of lies salvageable before it brings down our democracy? The jury is still out on this one.
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