That’s not simply because Donald Trump remains the dominant Republican figure. The former president lies incessantly and his aberrant behavior forces his fellow Republicans to lie about him.
The problem is deeper than one man. For a minority party joining blue-collar voters driven by cultural resentment with wealthy donors fixated on the bottom line, winning and exercising power requires dissembling beyond the conventional misconception that politicians of all parties have always used to amass popular support.
One of the GOP’s most successful political consultants in decades made that judgment in a 2020 confessional memoir. Stuart Stevens titled his book, “It Was All a Lie.”
A clear example of politics is tax cuts. Like other Republican candidates in 2016, Trump promised that his tax plan would benefit the middle class, not the wealthy.
“It’s going to cost me a fortune,” said the billionaire candidate.
That promise not to cut taxes for the wealthy was crafted so as not to alienate his working-class supporters. But it was false. As originally proposed and eventually passed by Republican lawmakers, Trump’s plan provided the biggest tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans.
Lately, Republicans have managed this problem by keeping their goals secret. They adopted no platform at their 2020 national convention. To avoid a forum in which the party’s candidate would be pressured to speak honestly, the Republican National Committee recently abandoned cooperation with the nonpartisan Commission on Presidential Debates.
Sen. Rick Scott of Florida, the wealthy former health care executive leading the party’s campaign to win back the Senate, recently suggested new taxes for Americans with modest incomes. Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell rejected the idea; Asked about the party’s agenda if he regains control of the House, the Kentucky Republican recently said, “I’ll let you know when we get him back.”
Trusting extremists whose views and behavior repel mainstream voters requires more deception. So Rep. Paul Gosar of Arizona denies knowing the views of the white nationalists with whom he associates; Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia testifies that she has no recollection of making statements, such as accusing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of “treason,” that video cameras recorded.
Because he needs their support, House Republican Leader McCarthy avoids disciplining Greene and Gosar for their suggestions of violence against their Democratic colleagues. He falsely indicated that the Democrats had also suggested violence.
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Survey of the Research Institute of Public Religion earlier this year showed that roughly a quarter of Republicans are drawn to the bizarre fantasies of QAnon, a movement that holds that Satan-worshiping pedophiles control the government and the media. Competing for their loyalty pushes Republican politicians past the point of credibility.
During Supreme Court confirmation hearings for Biden’s Supreme Court pick, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, Republican senators, including Ted Cruz of Texas, concocted the charge that Jackson had handled child pornography cases with excessive leniency. . the conservative
National Review dismissed the attack as “meritless to the point of demagoguery”; Cruz earned a reprimand from an eminent conservative federal judge for whom he had once clerked.
In the fight for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, Cruz became the target of absurd claims. After Trump hinted that Cruz’s father was connected to the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the Texas senator stopped feigning affection.
“I’m going to do something I haven’t done all season,” Cruz said. “I’m going to tell you what I really think about Donald Trump… This man is a pathological liar.”
As president, Trump lived up to Cruz’s label. On his first full day in office, he sent press secretary Sean Spicer making false claims about the size of his inaugural crowd. Trump lied about politics (claiming that he had convinced North Korea to denuclearize) and personal (insisting that he knew nothing about the payments to Stormy Daniels).
After federal prosecutors charged his political adviser Steve Bannon with fraudulently using a We Build the Wall fundraising effort to defraud supporters, Trump pardoned him. The last Trump White House chief of staff was Mark Meadows, a former member of the right-wing fringe in the House; Brendan Buck, former chief assistant to two Republican speakers,
he called Meadows “a world-class liar.”The GOP’s existential challenge is to maintain power as demographic change erodes the influence of its overwhelmingly white voter base. Republicans lost the popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections.
With the big lie of 2020, Republicans are using false claims of fraud to pretend that Trump has lost nothing. After being rejected by election officials and the courts, the extremists staged the deadly insurrection on January 6.
From the start, Republicans glossed over the fallout by targeting radical leftists rather than Trump supporters. Fox host Laura Ingraham did so even as she privately urged the White House to suspend the insurgents. Former Trump Cabinet Secretary Rick Perry has denied sending a text message about voter fraud that contained his digital signature.
In fact, House Republicans have made telling the truth about the election a disqualification. They fired Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming as conference chair and ostracized Rep. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, the two Republican members who participated in a House committee investigation on Jan. 6.
That makes McCarthy’s lie about his private post-insurrection comments, in which he told colleagues he planned to ask Trump to resign, unremarkable. Trapped by audiotape after denying that he had said it, McCarthy lied about the lie. He insisted that he had been denying something else that he had not been accused of.
McCarthy has long publicly reiterated his loyalty to Trump. Fellow Republicans reacted as casually to setbacks as the former president did.
Trump told the Wall Street Journal: “I think it’s all a huge compliment, frankly.”
