If I had just one thing to say to every American before they voted, it would be to put every issue on the back burner for only one second and recognize how dangerous it is to have someone who is as fundamentally dishonest as Donald Trump in the presidency. But don’t stop at how often he lies. Look at the scale. Because scale is extremely important here.
Look at how big Trump’s lies are. In this regard, the size really does matter.
And so with that premise, I think the following article (see quote box below) should be at the very tip top of the list for required reading before anyone casts that vote. In my view, it represents the core of what MAGA really is and from that everything it claims to believe in. Once you understand the premise of that article, think about everything else in this election and in the last decade of Trump with it in mind.
In fact, one could argue that MAGA is itself the “big lie” of what we once knew as conservatism. It’s a set of proposals so extremely ridiculous at this point, and is only becoming more extreme by the hour, that people only assume there must be something to it because it’s such a large movement with so many followers. It’s the self-reinforcing validity of massive scale. It must be real if it got that large. This brand of toothpaste must be the best because it’s from the biggest company.
But when you apply that kind of validity test to something based only on lies from the beginning, and you grow it daily for almost a decade, you end up with something so dangerous that even Republicans are warning of the threat. Think trying to digest all the lies from a century burning fossil fuels, throw in a dash of Enron, a side of WMD in Iraq, mix in some mortgage backed derivatives trading, Iran Contra, and Watergate… all at once and all the time. That’s Trump. I think I would argue he started in politics with his big lie about Obama’s birth certificate. For most would-be politicians, that should have been the end. But as with some throughout history, Trump is that one in a billion that squeaks through, again, again, and again. But from there, it’s just been an unending hurricane season of lies, one after the other, after the other. One bigger than the next.
At this point, there are so many big lies leading to bigger big lies that I’m fairly certain an awful human being like Elon Musk is backing Trump mostly because he’s been promised he’ll be on a rocket to Mars before Trump’s term is over. Like many looking for a way out, Musk likely sees the handwriting on the wall regarding where Trump’s MAGA movement of artificially enhanced, idiocratically fueled rage is eventually going to take America, one way or another.
But Conway’s comments… as he criticized Trump over his misleading claims about President Joe Biden using disaster relief funds on housing immigrants…
“It’s a form of projection… The words that came to mind when I read about this controversy today is the große Lüge,” Conway continued. “That’s German. I don’t speak German, so forgive my pronunciation. But große Lüge is ‘big lie.’…
It was a phrase coined by Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf in 1925 for a propaganda technique by which you tell as big a lie as possible so that people will believe bigger lies.”
“They will believe bigger lies more than they believe smaller lies because they simply think that it’s impossible for anybody to have the temerity to tell such an amazingly large lie.”
“But Donald Trump does that as a matter of course. He’s a pathological liar and a sociopath.”
In the end, we can’t forget that besides everything else, the BIG lie is simply a “technique.” But it’s a very very effective technique when being used by a rightwing authoritarian who’s followers like to unquestioningly follow leaders, as if they believe they’re in a military who’s at war, rather than in a society voting alongside their neighbors. The irony is that Trump’s huge lies are so constant and so extreme, that even Dick Cheney, a man who knowingly lied us into a war in Iraq (which only liberals were smart enough to warn people about by the way) — Trump is such a liar, that Dick Cheney, master of the big lie, knows that Trump has taken the big lie technique to a place that doesn’t just threaten everyone else in the world… it threatens America itself now, the very legitimacy of our existence as a reasonable democracy. That’s the difference between the old school big lies of the GOP and the big lie that is MAGA itself.
There were many in Germany who regretted falling for the big lies they were sold, lies they knew in their hearts were lies but still wanted to believe because of the sins of hatred, greed, resentment, and jealousy of their neighbors. But we have a chance to avoid that kind of regret, before Trump starts his inevitably violent Purge of people from our country, a Purge that would be far too reminiscent of what France and Germany attempted before WW2. MAGA-curious voters, do you really want your neighborhood immigrant’s home? Is that what this is really about now? Because that’s what JD Vance told you it’s about in his debate. That was a very big lie. Housing doesn’t cost what it costs because of immigrants. Housing costs what it costs because we haven’t built enough affordable homes in the right places. We’ve built too many McMansions in towns that have rusted away during the globalization that Republicans unanimously voted for in the first place — towns people can’t find jobs in or places where young people prefer not to live. I ask this question to MAGA and the MAGA-curious specifically, because certainly you do know who took people’s homes and gave them to “good Germans” don’t you?
Keep die große Lüge in mind, America. Your sixth sense tells you that the things Trump is saying are extremely dangerous lies. You may want to believe them, but we know you feel guilty about that somewhere buried down deep. But also, in the end, the thing is also just this:
America: You should be so much more offended by Trump than you are for thinking his cheap Nazi propaganda techniques would work on you.
It won’t in the end, right? Right?
Right?
