The Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin has been relentlessly critical of the Trump Republicans since the campaign, but it seems she still resists answering her own question.
“What’s the Republicans' excuse for backing an obsessive liar? Someone should start asking them.”
The answer is in front of her. Rubin isn’t the only one to resist seeing it. Most of the mainstream press doesn’t want to say it: The Republicans are backing an obsessive liar because they are attacking the idea of fact itself. No one does that better than Trump, but in that cause, Trump is the leader, not the lone warrior. The whole Republican Party is behind him because they fight for the legitimacy of lies; for arguments that are nonsense; for their right to nullify, ignore, or destroy evidence; and for safe spaces where their certainty about the world, people, science, etc., is insulated against contrary thinking. They want exemptions from empiricism. Trump lives by that ethos. That’s why he’s their leader.
Trump obliterated the implicit obligation of a politician to tell the truth. He explicitly embodies the entitlements Republicans all want, the right to one's own facts regardless of actual facts; the right to stand athwart history and yell stop at all the facts that make people equal under law, that require them to agree with empirical conclusions they don’t like. Trump is the craftiest, most brazen liar they have. He demands that for him, facts are determined by power, not by evidence. He promised the Republican voters that he’d give them that, and that power alone—his power—would restore them to social supremacy and economic safety.
What Rubin dreads to see is that in its weakness and fear, the Republican Party has already collapsed. They see generations of voters whom they can’t own and can’t stop: women, educated college graduates, minorities, new citizens, all claiming their places as citizens and casting their votes against them. They see their giant old industries and money suppliers fading. They see dynastic fortunes unable to hold reality back. They see science and technology investigating into their safe spaces, shifting power away from them, and falsifying their beliefs. They see people they used to intimidate being intimidated no longer. They see their own remaining reasonable statesmen and spokespeople heading for the door. So they need lies shouted over and over, but more than that, they need lying itself to have one last run on the stage. When that all fails, and they admit openly that the whole political process is no longer theirs to warp, the Right will do what it has always done: when they lose power based on logic and reason, they resort to force.