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Make Trump's Lying Bad Again
He is often his own worst enemy, but his ability to lie without generating outrage is a big part of how he clings to power.
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I still find it strange that so many Democrats would choose to make themselves captive to a predator like Donald Trump.
His State of the Union address appears to have been a political failure, except in one regard: Democrats’ biggest liability right now is the (correct) perception that they are weak. People may not, by and large, understand the intricacies of congressional customs and parliamentary procedure. But they have gathered, again correctly, that Democrats are fearful of pushing boundaries in those realms as a means of constraining Trump or delivering better outcomes for the country.
And it isn’t just a vague sense. Democrats have an unusual tendency to broadcast their strategic insights, such that Republicans know exactly how Democrats will react to various provocations, and can design those provocations to reinforce the perception of Democratic weakness.
Democrats will announce, for instance, that they do not intend to take any of Trump’s “bait,” freeing Trump to “bait” them with abuses of power and acts of corruption that Democrats have publicly deemed “distractions,” from kitchen-table issues. He does appalling things, they scarcely respond, rinse, repeat. With respect to the State of the Union address, Democratic leaders announced that members in attendance would maintain dignified silence in response to Trump, tipping Trump and his speechwriters off to the fact that they’d relinquished their freedom of movement. They wouldn’t heckle Trump, they wouldn’t stage a walkout, they wouldn’t publicly dispute his false claims.
Trump knew he could say, in essence, ‘if you like illegal immigrants more than U.S. citizens, stay seated,’ and Democrats would stay seated.
You’ve probably all watched that exchange by now.
To be clear, this wasn’t quite the coup Stephen Miller and gullible members of the political press corps think it was.
It will not “save the midterms” for Republicans and it won’t make the Trump-Miller ethnic-cleansing campaign any less unpopular. But it did drive home the point that Democrats in Congress (or many of them anyhow) can be dog-walked. That they’ve all but given up on the goal of making Trump pay a political price for his aberrant conduct.
He can lie and bluster and lie and bluster, and they will just… sit there, ashen-faced. Why suffer through lies? Why not think instead about what it would take to make the lies a liability for him again, in and of themselves? The foundation of Trump’s political power comprises the tiny minority of Americans who thrill to his lying; who derive sadistic joy from watching him batter his enemies with lies. But he has by no means convinced the majority Americans, including many of the people who voted for him, that lying constantly, about everything, is an acceptable way to behave. That is an untapped source of power.
As a captive viewer in my own right, I should confess my vulnerability to motivated reasoning. There’s nothing for decent people to like about how Trump comports himself, but I find the quotidian lying—$18 trillion worth of investment! Inherited record inflation!—more exasperating than his graver abuses. There are many ways to fight corruption, there are many ways to fight tyranny. Collective resistance forges solidarity and tends to weaken him. But there’s no really effective way, at this point, for regular people to oppose his Orwellian lying without behaving like scoldy hall monitors. Someone call the fact checkers!
It wasn’t always this way. It only became this way because Trump had more stamina to lie than we did, using our regular methods, to shame him for it.
Before Trump ran, lying the way he does came at a heavy cost. Before he became the GOP’s vice presidential nominee in 2012, Paul Ryan had cultivated an image of rectitude for himself. He’d flattered and charmed a bunch of journalists to launder him a reputation for honesty, humility, and wonkishness. But when he appea