I happened to spend some time with a highly intelligent 17-year-old over the weekend who's taking AP Government and is keenly interested in the election. She's following all the polling and the punditry and knows the ins and outs of the battleground map better than most adults I talk to. And she said something that struck me because I hadn't really considered it before. We were talking about the vice-presidential debate and she found it odd that it was so civil. She kept waiting for something to happen. And I realized that there are millions of people for whom Donald Trump's brand of demagogic politics is normal. They are either young like this person and have literally grown up in this era of bad feelings or they are those for whom politics wasn't of interest until Trump came along. That's a lot of people who don't know that it isn't supposed to be this way.
Granted we have had more spirited arguments in televised political debates than the one we witnessed last week between JD Vance and Tim Walz. But we never had the kind of debates like those that Donald Trump has participated in since 2016. It's also true that we never had election campaigns like Donald Trump's presidential campaigns and we certainly never had a presidency like his. You have to wonder, is this going to be the way it is going forward even after he's gone?
It's hard to imagine that it will be exactly the same. Trump is sui generis. But what has the next generation of GOP leaders learned from him that can be used for their own ambition? I imagine there are many things but I think there is one very clear lesson: You can lie with impunity.
Some of the new GOP leaders, like Vance and House Speaker Mike Johnson, have obviously discovered that if they lie with a congenial look on their faces, there is no limit to how much they can get away with. Politicians have always lied to some degree, of course. In the past, we used to call it spin because they would not dare to just lie outright and essentially tell the voters that they shouldn't believe their own eyes or depend on their own memories. But what we are seeing today is a major shift in what is acceptable in politics — and it goes way beyond Trump.
Vance does not have a naturally pleasant personality but he discovered in that debate that if he didn't crudely disparage "childless cat ladies" or accuse Haitian immigrants of eating pets, he could lie flagrantly about the past and his plans for the future as long as he kept a smile on his face. Consider that he congenially but blatantly lied about having said that he favored a national abortion ban, that Donald Trump had saved Obamacare, that carbon emissions aren't the main cause of climate change (suggesting that climate change is "weird science") and that Chinese imports raised the cost of consumer goods. That's not spin. It's an assault on reality. Those lies and more went unchecked and I would guess that millions of people watching believed him because he said them with such a pleasant tone.
Out on the stump Vance plays to the MAGA crowd, but he's just as dishonest. One of his favorite lines is “They couldn’t beat him politically, so they tried to bankrupt him. They failed at that, so they tried to impeach him. They failed at that, so they tried to put him in prison. They even tried to kill him.” Whichever persona he assumes, attack dog or affable colleague, the lies are the one consistent feature of his speeches.
Another up-and-comer, Mike Johnson, ever the reasonable sounding fellow, has become adept at MAGA lying. Just this weekend he went on Fox News and said that the federal response to Hurricane Helene is a failure.
That's a lie and he knows it. You can ask any of the Republican governors and local officials in the affected area and they will say that the feds have been on the ground since before the hurricane hit and have been excellently coordinating the massive response.
We need your help to stay independent
In the past one would have expected this sort of thing from the likes of Florida gadfly Rep. Matt Gaetz but not the Speaker of the House. This kind of blatant falsehood is now completely normal among Republicans. Johnson, like Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton, sat for a Sunday show interview over the weekend and refused to acknowledge that Trump lost the 2020 election.
They are spreading these lies on social media and television and are backed up by Trump's eager endorser Elon Musk and a massive disinformation campaign. The Republican nominee for lieutenant governor in Indiana, for example, shared a fake image to blast the Biden administration's handling of hurricane relief, writing on X that "it doesn't matter if this image is AI-generated or real."
Then there is Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, who was once a respectable conservative and considered a strong candidate for president. Today he sounds like a Russian trollbot going the truther route on what he falsely called "the fake" September jobs report:
The last two reports have been revised up, but that is beside the point. The Bureau of Labor Statistics is a non-partisan agency. Rubio knows this. He is lying.
Want a daily wrap-up of all the news and commentary Salon has to offer? Subscribe to our morning newsletter, Crash Course.
Republicans do this reflexively now, without any fear of repercussions from their voters, some of whom actually respect them for doing it while those poor souls who actually believe what they're saying give them money and take their lives into their hands. There is no price to be paid for dishonesty and evidently they believe they have something to gain.
This didn't start with Donald Trump, although he's the first one to turn a profit from it. This really started back in the 1990s with Newt Gingrich and the primer written by Republican strategist Frank Luntz called "Language: A Key Mechanism of Control" for Gingrich's political action committee, GOPAC. A few years later we were lied into the Iraq war by the Bush administration. New York Times Magazine published an article in 2004 by reporter Ron Suskind who interviewed a senior administration aide, presumed to be Karl Rove, also known as Bush's Brain:
The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' [...] 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors...and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do'.
I'm not sure Rove thought it would devolve into an orgy of lying about everything, distorting even their own concept of reality, but that's where we are now. (Thanks a lot Karl.) Perhaps it was inevitable that a celebrity demagogue and pathological liar would take the mantle of "history's actor" and turn it into political World Wide Wrestling but the consequences of this little experiment are dire.
We owe it to my young 17-year-old friend to do everything we can to turn this country back into a reality-based community. No society can function swimming in deceit and corruption for very long. And right now we are drowning in it.
Shares