For most of us here in the real world, listening to the Grand Nagus speak at one of his “rallies” can be a painful experience. We all understand why; the man is a malignant narcissist, a con artist, and just a generally terrible human being, and everything he says is so tinged with effusive (and unwarranted) self-praise, resentment, narcissism, cruelty and malice that it makes sane, rational, compassionate people uncomfortable at the very least. Not to mention that it’s all based on nonsense, delusion and wishful thinking, not on any reality that any sane, competent, discerning person can actually see. Literally nothing the man says can be believed.
I’ve always thought that “bullshit” was a better word than “lies” or “lying” to describe the substance of what emanates from the Nagus’s inexhaustible pie-hole. In order to lie, inter alia, a liar has to both know and care what the truth is; a bullshitter doesn’t, and the Drumpfenführer certainly doesn’t. In his case, though, because his bullshit is so malicious, spiteful and belligerent, because his fans uncritically swallow it whole, and are drawn to him rather than repelled by him because of the self-praise, resentment, narcissism, cruelty and malice that he firehoses into their brains, and because he’s the effing President of the effing United States, it’s toxic bullshit. And because it’s constant, unending, relentless, with the volume turned up to 11, it’s a firehose of toxic bullshit.
Of course, toxic bullshit is nothing new, and we all understand that Trump is just as much the result of it as a source of it. From the beginnings of conservative talk radio in the late 1980s, to the GOPAC memo of the early ‘90s, the creation of Fox News, the cynical, hypocritical and opportunistic Clinton impeachment, the contested 2000 election, the national trauma of 9/11, the divisive, unjustified, botched invasion of Iraq, the nomination of the self-evidently ridiculous Sarah Palin for vice president, the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, the Inauguration-night meeting of Republican leaders committing to unprincipled obstruction of the Obama presidency, the creation and rise of the well-funded, phony, disingenuous so-called “Tea Party,” birtherism, Benghazi® and Her E-mails™, and everything in between, one could not wander into Republican or conservative circles without being inundated with toxic bullshit.
Throughout all this, only one thing was missing. Republican voters and fans got their daily fix from talk radio, Fox News and the Internet, and even some Republican politicians got into the act in broadcast interviews and on the campaign trail. But Republican presidential candidates, by and large, stayed above the fray and maintained some semblance of dignity, some (for lack of a better term) respectable distance between themselves and the Limbaughs, Coulters, Hannitys, Becks and Breitbarts of the world. Say what you will about Bob Dole, George W. Bush, John McCain and Mitt Romney; none of those men was a firehose of toxic bullshit.
But by the time Romney ran for President in 2012 the Republican Party and its “base” were already drowning in toxic bullshit. Romney thus had to walk a tightrope; his campaign wasn’t necessarily toxic, but it was mostly bullshit, best epitomized by running mate Paul Ryan’s convention speech, an avalanche of talking points from that year’s Republican fan fiction, the general reaction to which outside the paracosm was, “WTF is he talking about?” Ryan getting taken to the proverbial woodshed by Joe Biden in their debate was a wonder to behold. Romney, of course, lost handily, despite unequivocal assurances from Fox et al. that the polls were “skewed” and that he was poised to win in a landslide over the self-evidently villainous Kenyan usurper. Stung by that loss, and by Obama’s continued popularity despite everything they “knew” about him, Republican voters decided that what they really wanted, and what they really needed in order to win in 2016, was a veritable flood of toxic bullshit.
Of course, they found it in Donald Trump, or perhaps we should say, he and they found each other; a match made in Orwellian hell. He was the perfect candidate at the perfect time for a party and constituency that could no longer build a national consensus or majority around anything resembling “policy” or governance yet paradoxically believed itself to be self-evidently right about everything, superior to its counterpart, and overwhelmingly popular. Since pedestrian things like policy and governance clearly wouldn’t get them anywhere, they went ahead and nominated a firehose of toxic bullshit.
As a result, as we approach 2020 at least a third of the country is trapped in an authoritarian death spiral, straight out of Orwell: they Love Big Brother and would believe that 2+2=5 if Big Brother required it of them. And Big Brother is a firehose of toxic bullshit.
The Republican performance at the televised impeachment hearings and related public appearances was and continues to be an avalanche of malevolent counterfactual nonsense, the worst sort of up-is-down-black-is-white propaganda, the likes of which may be unprecedented in American politics. And I use the word “performance” quite deliberately; these are court jesters performing for their King, Big Brother himself, the President of the United States, a firehose of toxic bullshit.
Is there a way out? As usual I have to agree with Charlie Pierce: the only way out is for Republicans — meaning the party and its elected officials, leaders and candidates, not anecdotally but en masse — to come clean and cop to what they’ve been doing for the past 20-30 years. They have to break their own (and their fans’) fever. They have to break with Fox and talk radio, OANN and Breitbart, &c., admit that it was all a lie, and admit to their base that they’ve been had. They have to turn off, and turn away from, the firehose of toxic bullshit.
Of course, that won’t happen. The owners of the GOP — the richest, most powerful industries, corporations, and men who own and control them — are getting what they’ve paid for in the form of tax cuts, deregulation, and court-stacking. There can be only one reason to do, and cumulative effect of, these three things in tandem: reducing the GOP’s owners’ “cost of doing business” in the United States to near-zero, and making sure that they’re never held accountable for the harm they cause to the public, consumers, workers, and the environment. How do they get people, whom they see as merely inconvenient obstacles in their quest for unlimited, unaccountable profit, to vote for that?
With a firehose of toxic bullshit.