It's not so much that Trump lies, or that the bulk of his party lies for him. Republican lying (the working-class benefits of supply-side economics, the Iraq war, the alternating evils or splendor of federal deficits, depending on who's in the White House) is by now so commonplace we scarcely notice any longer and even more rarely object in shocked outrage. It's more that they're so frightfully bad at lying; the Machiavellian gracefulness of partisan mendacity has, for Republicans, gone the route of their workable policy ideas — which is to say, in a cesspool of vacuity.
Yesterday, they were at it again. Trump, the eternal victim, protested that "I’m not a racist. I am the least racist person you have ever interviewed, that I can tell you." To substantiate his innocence about his "shithole countries" remark, he called on his reliable pack of liars: "Did you see what various [Republican] senators in the room said about my comments?" The "various" GOP senators would be the undifferentiated David Perdue of Georgia and Arkansas' Tom Cotton. Both had earlier reported that they did "not recall the president saying these comments specifically," but, as the NY Times observes, "by Sunday, their recollections appeared to have sharpened." Both then proceeded to dispute Democratic Sen. Richard Durbin's retelling of Trump's "shithole" remark ("repeatedly"), with Perdue saying it was a "gross misrepresentation" and Cotton saying that Durbin "has a history of misrepresenting [grossly?] what happens in White House meetings." Meanwhile, Republican Sen. Jeff Flake reported that others attending the meeting in question had confirmed Durbin's account.
As, for that matter, had the White House and the president himself. As NBC News tells it, "the White House issued a statement Thursday that did not deny the remarks"; and "two sources close to the administration [said] that Trump worked the phones Thursday night, calling friends and allies outside the White House to gauge reaction to fallout from [his] 'shithole' comments."
What's more, not even Trump's bigoted and usually complementary base has bothered denying his racist smear. They're everywhere — on-air, on Twitter and in blogs — affirming Trump's revealed wisdom about the wretched shithole-ness of African and Latin American nations. They'd be crushed to learn that Sens. Perdue and Cotton are now telling the truth. However the base knows they are not, because the base knows Sens. Perdue and Cotton.
Not content with lying about his shithole remarks, Trump went on yesterday to lie about Democrats' sincerity in negotiating a DACA deal. "I don’t think the Democrats want to make a deal. I think they talk about DACA but they don’t want to help the DACA people," said the president. There are numerous sticking points but wouldn't you know it "they are all Democratic sticking points. They don’t want security at the border, there are people pouring in. They don’t want security at the border, they don’t want to stop the drugs. And they want to take money away from our military, which we will not do."
Oh dear, these Democrats, they are bad bad people, are they not? Well, not according to Republican Flake, who tweeted: "I’ve served with 'The Democrats' for 17 years, and not one has ever been intent on 'having people and drugs pour into our country.'" (Incidentally, it was my understanding from this guileless administration that the Obamian phenomenon of rapists — Mexicans — pouring across the border was down to a negligible trickle.)
What are we to make of all this Republican and presidential lying, disingenuous finger-pointing and pissing on reality? E.J. Dionne today cites the work of political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, which I also cited four days ago. In their new book, How Democracies Die, they write that our system of government requires "mutual toleration" — "the understanding that competing parties accept one another as legitimate rivals." Trump, notes Dionne, hasn't the vaguest idea as to what these concepts mean, and even less interest in learning. He instead "persistently mak[es] himself, his personality, his needs, his prejudices and his stability the central topics of our political conversation," thus "blocking the public conversation we ought to be having about how to move forward." There is no immediate way out of Trump's shitty rabbit hole, since news is news and the most profitable news is sensationalism.
It's also of some note that historian Ellen Schecker made roughly the same argument about Joe McCarthy; his deranged obsessions with communists everywhere (and practically nowhere) — his propensity to make all debates persistently about himself, his personality, his needs, his prejudices and his stability — dominated news coverage for years and suffocated talk "about how to move forward" in public policy. Such is the demagogue's way — to obliterate public progress and showboat the egotistical needs of a witless blowhard. But hey, Wisconsin put McCarthy in the Senate, and the American electorate, Trump in the White House. Hence our maneuverability in outrage, some would go on to argue, is somewhat self-constrained. How do democracies die? From the bottom up.
But we're not dead yet. We survived the human abominations of slavery, the vicious racism of the mid- and late-19th century and the early 20th, the emotional paralyzation of McCarthyism, the attempted murder of Martin Luther King's human equality and socioeconomic messages — and the assorted stupidities of modern pseudoconservatism. All I ask of its practitioners is that they start lying with a touch of sparkle, a bit of éclat, at least a flake of panache. I think that's a reasonable request. Don't you, Mr. Trump?