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Many Americans believe the hardest thing for presidential historians to explain about this year’s election should be how Donald Trump has held such a tight grip on the Republican Party despite being criminally indicted for attempting to violently overthrow democracy four years ago.
Elected Republicans including Mike Pence and his family ran for their lives along with Democrats from the violent insurrectionists Trump sent to attack them to try to prevent Congress from certifying President Biden’s election. Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and Senate Leader Mitch McConnell publicly denounced Trump’s actions.
Four years later, McCarthy is gone, McConnell is a pale shadow of the powerful Senate leader he once was, and Trump is back again as the Republican nominee spewing increasingly insane threats of a violent “bloodbath” in America unless he’s elected in November.
But it’s not difficult to track how Trump’s escalating lies throughout his single four-year term as president destroyed Republicans as a conservative political party and attracted the armed hate groups into the party that Trump called upon to keep him in power after Biden defeated him in 2020 with the largest vote in history.
The lies that ate the Republican Party began the summer after Trump took office with what turned out to be a dress rehearsal for the violent insurrection that ended Trump’s presidency four years later.
Very Fine People?
Trump praised the “very fine people on both sides” in the Unite the Right riot in Charlottesville, Va., a national gathering of Nazis wearing swastikas, Klansmen in hoods and other rightwing extremists celebrating Trump’s election by violently protesting the city’s removal of Confederate monuments.
The street protests turned deadly when a self-identified Nazi from Ohio drove his speeding car into a large biracial crowd of pro-democracy counter protesters. He killed a young woman and seriously injured dozens of others. The night before, the Nazi contingent carried torches into the University of Virginia campus threatening students and chanting “Jews will not replace us!” and “Into the ovens!”
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Roger Stone, who advised the criminal Republican presidencies of Richard Nixon and Trump, coined the slogan “Stop the steal!” in 2016 to falsely accuse Hillary Clinton of massive vote fraud when everyone including Trump thought she would win. The campaign expected that battle cry to raise millions of dollars from gullible Trump voters. They were right, but they had to delay their scam for four years when Trump shocked America and the world by winning the election.
It’s never been a secret among elected Republicans or Democrats that Trump is a pathological liar. Fact checkers for The Washington Post, the hometown newspaper for members of Congress and administration officials, meticulously documented a final tally of 50,573 lies by Trump as president. Most of us have known someone who lies a lot, but it’s safe to say none of us have ever known anyone before who’s told 50,573 lies.
Lies About Election Fraud
There’s only one thing more dangerous than Trump’s lies about election fraud inciting his violent supporters to overturn American elections. It’s all the crimes Trump promises to commit if he’s ever elected again. His first priority is appointing a corrupt attorney general to dismiss his criminal indictments and replace legitimate federal prosecutors with MAGA Republicans. The second is to lock up “the entire Biden crime family.” Trump’s supporters laugh when he says he’ll become a dictator on Day One like he’s joking. He’s not.
Trump’s scariest new threat was expressing support for allowing Republican states to monitor women’s pregnancies to prosecute them for violating abortion bans. He told a brand-new lie claiming widespread support for the Supreme Court supermajority he appointed to destroy 50 years of constitutional abortion rights for women. Trump said “all legal scholars, both sides, wanted and in fact demanded” that laws controlling abortion be returned to the states. No, they didn’t. Constitutional rights for women to make decisions about their own bodies and their own lives don’t exist if they can be abolished by politicians in any state.
Trump has made it clear if he’s elected again he doesn’t intend to have anyone in his administration who doesn’t believe his two biggest lies. Trump’s appointees will be expected to believe that he won the 2020 election and that the violent Jan. 6 attack on Congress was a peaceful demonstration by patriotic Americans who are now being unfairly imprisoned by Biden as political hostages.
The hiring standards will be even higher for Trump’s vice-presidential running mate. Vice President Pence fell out of favor with Trump for insisting on counting electoral votes in states won by Biden based on actual election results. Republicans went to a lot of trouble creating fake electors for Trump in those states.
Trump believes when the U.S. is fortunate enough to have someone like him as president, it should consider the political system he admires in other nations of electing presidents for life.
