July 26, 2021

[AE.Politics] Lies, Big Lies, and Loyalty Tests

There’s a quote from George Orwell, from (what else?) 1984, that people love to quote in relation to Donald Trump:

The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.

If you followed me closely during the Trump era, you know that I find this quote is misapplied. For Donald Trump, rejecting the evidence of your senses is not the final command but the first, most foundational one. It’s what he requires as table stakes to get in the game with him. It’s the price of admission.

There is no starker example of this than the way he began his first and last term in office: he lied about the crowd size at his inauguration, he lied about the weather, and he immediately required his newly-minted lieutenants to go out and repeat those lies.

Sean Spicer was made to foolishly repeat and elaborate on a pointless, petty, obvious, and easily debunked lie at a completely unrelated event in front of a room full of CIA personnel, people who spread and see through lies for a living.

The reason Trump operates this way is that it’s more efficient. The Party in 1984 invested a considerable amount of personal time and attention in turning the rebellious Winston Smith into the kind of drone who would agree that 2 + 2 = 5 one minute and that it was 3 the next, depending on what the leaders told him.

Trump has never had that kind of time or energy to devote to the subject of someone else’s mind, so his modus operandi has always been to filter for loyalty and gullibility up front. If he says 2 + 2 = 5 and you argue, you’re a waste of his time at best and a dangerous enemy at worst.

He’s after the people who will agree without question, whether because they believe he’s a magical truth-telling figure who Tells It Like It Is or because they fear him or even because they think that agreeing with the pointless, easy to disprove lie will give them credibility to push back when it matters.

It’s all the same to him because he understands what Orwell or his fictional party members missed: getting people to back up your outrageous lies is the entry point to controlling their thoughts, not the endgame of doing so.

A lot of people expected Spicer would repudiate Trump or be more rueful about the lies he had touted on behalf of Hair Furor once it was clear Trump had nothing left to offer him, but the truth is that Spicer has been Trump’s creature through and through since January 21st of 2017, since the day he stood before a room of loyalist plants and CIA personnel and declared that the fake news had deceived the public with misleading photos and that Trump’s inauguration was biggest, period.

This is all old news and well-known to long-time readers of the Erin Endeavor, but it’s preamble to the point I would like to make today, which is how deeply Trumpism – not just loyalty to Trump but aping his philosophy and methods – is now entrenched in the GOP.

See this tweet:

And Judd Legum’s QT cutting to the heart of what’s happening here:

“Lying is non-negotiable,” he says, and that’s a real hammer-on-the-head statement. Lying is non-negotiable because the highest value in the Republican Party is and has been for some time loyalty to the party.

Trump showed the leadership of the GOP that the highest and most efficient form of loyalty is loyalty to the lies the leadership tells.

It’s easy and comfortable to toe the party line when the party line is true and the speaker believes it. It’s the willingness to follow the party line right to the mouth of hell and down into it when the speaker knows it’s false and wrong and even dangerously destructive that separates the truly faithful from what Thomas Paine called “the summer soldiers and sunshine patriots”.

The perverse thing about this is that it ensures Trump’s influence will continue to loom over the Republican Party for years to come, because now it doesn’t matter if McCarthy or McConnell or anyone else finds Trump’s Big Lie about the election inconvenient or unnecessary.

Where Orwell’s Party could retroactively pivot the focus of an entire war with a single announcement, Trump’s method of tying lies to loyalty right up front means that anyone who tries to peddle a contrary story to the masses will be seen as disloyal and thus unreliable.

It’s possible that some of those in power in the GOP right now are propping up and furthering Trump’s narrative in the hopes that it will give them the credibility they need to marginalize his political efforts in the next few election cycles.

If so, they’re going to be doomed to repeat the failures of everybody in the previous administration who repeated Trump’s lies in the hopes that they could stay in their position long enough to moderate or isolate him.

People who repeat Trump’s lies in the hopes of gaining power rather than giving it to him are missing something crucial about the world: if the truth will set you free, then to reject the truth is to reject freedom.