If you’re surprised that Donald Trump came along to the Republican Party, started lying with the unrepentant glee of a raccoon eating cat food, and was rewarded with increasing popularity, the nomination, and ultimately the presidency, maybe a five-year-old article from a website you’ve probably never heard of will prove instructive.
Writing for The Baffler in 2012, Rick Perlstein wrote a column about Mitt Romney that you could run a Find & Replace on, sticking Trump’s name in there instead, and publish right now without anyone knowing the difference.
For example, its very beginning — here, I’ll run that Find & Replace and show you.
Donald Trump is a liar. Of course, in some sense, all politicians, even all human beings, are liars. Trump’s lying went so over-the-top extravagant by this summer, though, that the New York Times editorial board did something probably unprecedented in their polite gray precincts: they used the L-word itself. “Mr. Trump’s entire campaign rests on a foundation of short, utterly false sound bites,” they editorialized. He repeats them “so often that millions of Americans believe them to be the truth.” “It is hard to challenge these lies with a well-reasoned-but-overlong speech,” they concluded; and how. Trump’s lying, in fact, was so richly variegated that it can serve as a sort of grammar of mendacity.
Again: This was an article about Mitt Romney in which I replaced his name with Trump’s. Is there any noticeable difference?
He goes on well beyond this, though, and it’s an instructive introduction to the right-wing ecosystem of lies as well as the world we live in under Trump. Perlstein asks:
All righty, then: both the rank-and-file voters and the governing elites of a major American political party chose as their standardbearer a pathological liar. What does that reveal about them?
In his pursuit of an answer, Perlstein goes on to subscribe to newsletters from some of our favorite conservative scam news sites, like Newsmax and Townhall.
What he finds may not exactly be a surprise if you’ve ever watched advertisements on Fox News, but the depth to which all these things are integrated may shock you.
I could certainly quote huge chunks of his article (and, indeed, I will), but you should definitely just go read it for yourself. It won’t take that long, and you’ll probably only vomit twice.
For the lazy among us, the crux of it is this: The entire right-wing fake-news ecosystem is not even really about politics.
That’s right: It’s not about politics. It’s not about policy. It’s not even about hating Hillary Clinton. All that is just a means to an end.
What it’s about, what it’s all about, what it’s always about, is money. And not “lower taxes on millionaires” or “repeal the estate tax” money; that part’s just a pleasant bonus for the conservative donors. No, this is “sell snake oil to unsuspecting rubes” money — a much, much bigger chunk of dough that can in turn pay for Republican politicians to (for instance) use the phrase “death tax” to describe a tax on multi-million-dollar inheritances.
Perlstein quotes a fine example, which comes from televangelist Peter Popoff to the newsletter readers of one conservative publication:
Dear Reader, I’m going to tell you something, but you must promise to keep it quiet. You have to understand that the “elite” would not be at all happy with me if they knew what I was about to tell you. That’s why we have to tread carefully. You see, while most people are paying attention to the stock market, the banks, brokerages and big institutions have their money somewhere else . . . [in] what I call the hidden money mountain . . . All you have to know is the insider’s code (which I’ll tell you) and you could make an extra $6,000 every single month.
It’s all the greatest hits! The “elite” don’t want you to have this “secret” information. The “elite” are zagging while you’re zigging. The “elite” are hiding money, but you can access it! Trust me! Only I can fix your money problems. Just pay me some money and we’ll get started.
Perlstein goes on to note the "23-Cent Heart Miracle" that “Washington, the medical industry, and drug companies REFUSE to tell you about" as well as the proliferation of people selling penny stocks for a company selling what they call (yes, in their own words) "an oilfield in the placenta," not to mention offering "INSTANT INTERNET INCOME" and the opportunities to “Reverse Crippling Arthritis in 2 Days,” and “Clear Clogged Arteries Safely & Easily—without drugs, without surgery, and without a radical diet,” as well as “High Blood Pressure Cured in 3 Minutes . . . Drop Measurement 60 Points.”
It goes on and on — all providing the ad dollars that pay for you (okay, you’re reading this article on DailyKos, so probably not you) to read the pseudo-journalistic mind-sludge put out by people like Ann Coulter. It’s a never-ending feedback loop of “the elites are bad, so buy this useless garbage to stick it to the elites!”
Again, this isn’t fringe stuff. These are the websites and email newsletters of mainstream conservatives. And this is exactly what Trump was doing with Trump University — participating in a cycle of inciting desperation, then preying on it for personal gain. And lying throughout.
One more quote:
[T]his stuff is as important to understanding the conservative ascendancy as are the internecine organizational and ideological struggles that make up its official history—if not, indeed, more so. The strategic alliance of snake-oil vendors and conservative true believers points up evidence of another successful long march, of tactics designed to corral fleeceable multitudes all in one place—and the formation of a cast of mind that makes it hard for either them or us to discern where the ideological con ended and the money con began. …
These are bedtime stories, meant for childlike minds. Or, more to the point, they are in the business of producing childlike minds. Conjuring up the most garishly insatiable monsters precisely in order to banish them from underneath the bed, they aim to put the target to sleep.
And that brings us back to Romney and Trump. Even today, it’s impossible to find a Republican officeholder (thus I exclude Mitt Romney’s criticism of Trump as a “phony,” which is a hilarious irony, as well as “conservative” media figures Shepard Smith, Chris Wallace and Ana Navarro, who might as well be bleeding-heart liberals by today’s standards) whose criticism of Trump includes the fact that he lies. Constantly. Compulsively. Endlessly. About everything.
Kind of reminds you of one last quote about Mitt Romney:
[T]hese lies are as transparent to his (Romney’s) Republican colleagues as they are to any other sentient being. Nor does it account for a still more curious fact—for all the objections that conservatives have aired over Romney’s suspect purity in these last months, not one prominent conservative has made Romney’s dishonesty part of the brief against him.
It’s time, in other words, to consider whether Romney’s fluidity with the truth is, in fact, a feature and not a bug: a constituent part of his appeal to conservatives. The point here is not just that he lies when he says conservative things, even if he believes something different in his heart of hearts—but that lying is what makes you sound the way a conservative is supposed to sound, in pretty much the same way that curlicuing all around the note makes you sound like a contestant on American Idol is supposed to sound. …
Lying is an initiation into the conservative elite. In this respect, as in so many others, it’s like multilayer marketing: the ones at the top reap the reward—and then they preen, pleased with themselves for mastering the game. Closing the sale, after all, is mainly a question of riding out the lie: showing that you have the skill and the stones to just brazen it out, and the savvy to ratchet up the stakes higher and higher.
This is it. This is what we’re contending with. This is what we need to overcome, and I don’t know that I can tell you how. Lying frequently and compulsively and brazenly, and building lies on top of lies when you get called out for them, IS what makes Republicans like you. It is the foundation of today’s Republican Party. It is exactly what Donald Trump does every day — ratcheting the stakes higher and higher by telling more and bigger lies, by having the Conways and Spicers of the world tell blatant lies on television, and by bringing on his Mooch buddy to tell even bigger, crazier ones.
What do we do about it? What can we do about it? How do we get through to people who turn their ears and minds off unless you tell them the lies they want to hear?
As I have every day since that fateful November night, I fear for my country.