Wow. Really? Did you folks know that?
Here's Baker's headline:
In Trump’s Alternative Reality, Lies and Distortions Drive ChangeBaker writes:
The United States sent $50 million in condoms to Hamas. Diversity programs caused a plane crash. China controls the Panama Canal. Ukraine started the war with Russia.It will be good if Baker's readers genuinely grasp the power of lies in U.S. politics over their Sunday brunches. But I wish they'd noticed this a long time ago -- I wish Baker had noticed this a long time ago -- because Republicans have been making policy out of lies, or at least trying to, for decades, and they've used lies to make millions of Americans despise Democrats and look at Democratic policy ideas with deep suspicion.
Except, no. None of that is true. Not that it stops President Trump. In the first month since he returned to power, he has demonstrated once again a brazen willingness to advance distortions, conspiracy theories and outright lies to justify major policy decisions.
Remember when Ronald Reagan delivered a speech in which he implied that we needed to support the Nicaraguan contras because the left-wing Sandinista government was an imminent threat to the U.S. mainland? In 1986, Reagan said:
Defeat for the contras would mean a second Cuba on the mainland of North America. It'd be a major defeat in the quest for democracy in our hemisphere, and it would mean consolidation of a privileged sanctuary for terrorists and subversives just 2 days' driving time from Harlingen, Texas.Reagan was a tad less shameless than Trump, so he conceded that an actual invasion of the United States by Nicaraguan troops was unlikely:
Now, I don't think any of us are going to try and sell the idea that just a little Nicaragua could represent a threat to the United States....But if so, why did he say this? Why did he plant the idea in the first place? But Reagan told a lot of whoppers. Remember when he said trees cause more pollution than automobiles? Good times.
In the following decade, we heard many lies about Bill Clinton -- that he was once a Russian agent, that he was a murderer with a "body count," that Whitewater was a major financial scandal, that the Clinton healthcare plan was radical and Marxist, and so on. We went to war in the following decade because the George W. Bush administration deceived us in a very Trumpian way about the nonexistent ties between Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, and about an Iraqi weapons program that no longer existed.
More recently, Republicans attacked imaginary "death panels" in Barack Obama's healthcare plan. They laid the groundwork for overturning Roe v. Wade by arguing that early-stage fetuses have heartbeats that, in fact, aren't heartbeats. They blamed school shootings on the lack of prayer in schools (our mayor here in New York City still believes that one), or on anti-depressants; they said the majority of school shooters are trans. They prevent popular gun safety measures from being enacted in part by making these false arguments.
They've been lying about Democratic voter fraud since the Bush years. Now they lie about the COVID vaccines Trump helped to develop.
And then there's the ur-lie, the one that undergirds all the other lies: that Democrats are communist America-haters who gratuitously tax and spend for no reason other than to destroy America and exercise social control. All the money they take in is frittered away on wasteful, needless programs -- you could cut nearly all of it and no one would miss it.
That lie goes back to the pre-Reagan era. Is anyone old enough to remember Senate William Proxmire -- a Democrat -- and his "Golden Fleece Awards," which helped create the impression that the people running our government, especially when they're liberal, spend money like drunken sailors, as Ronald Reagan was fond of saying?
We now have an opportunity to learn that that's a lie -- that while there's some waste and fraud in government spending, the government spends money on programs that bring Americans real benefits, and the workers involved are mostly good people trying to do a good job. This guy believed the lie:
He went to work for the federal government believing it needed serious reform. He thought super-genius Elon Musk would carefully bring about reform. And now he sees that Musk is "coming in with a wrecking ball and destroying people's lives."
He believed this in large part because, like everyone else in America, he's been given the impression that government spending is massively wasteful, and we just need to empower a persistent, capable person to get to the bottom of it.
Of course our system is unprepared to combat Trump's lies. The conservative movement and the Republican Party are built to defend lies. Under Trump, they're in their comfort zone.