Fake news about the Big Lie

Trump may be suspended from Facebook and banned from Twitter, but he's still at it, and the Republican Party is going all in on him.

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The big story making the rounds these past few days has been the fate of Liz Cheney, which seems foregone, given the state of her party these days.  She faces a vote next week on whether she should retain her leadership position, that of Chairwoman of the House Republican Conference, the third most powerful position on the Republican side of the aisle in the House.  House Republican Whip Steve Scalise came out against her this morning, endorsing Elise Stefanik, an arch-conservative Trumpster and up-and-comer in the party.  Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy had already appeared on Trump’s favorite TV program, Fox and Friends, and was caught on a hot mic telling host Steve Doocy off-air, “I’ve had it with her.  I’ve lost confidence.  I think she’s got real problems.”

Former president Trump weighed in on Wednesday with an endorsement of Stefanik, putting out a statement calling her “a far superior choice” and “a tough and smart communicator!” (exclamation point in the original text of the Trump statement, naturally).

Jeremy Adler, a spokesman for Cheney, quickly put out a statement:  “This moment is about much more than a House leadership fight.”

Is it ever.  While Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have been out on the hustings building support for the American Jobs Plan and the American Family Plan and working to get 70 percent of Americans vaccinated by July the 4th, the Republican Party is back in Washington pledging fealty to Donald Trump.  It’s a strategy that would seem incredibly self-defeating until you realize that they’re not running against Democratic plans for the country in the upcoming mid-term elections that will determine control of the House and the Senate, they’re running for Donald Trump. He’s their whole campaign.  The single issue they have is whether or not you support his fiction that Joe Biden is an illegitimate president because he stole the election from Donald Trump.

Democrats are calling it the “Big Lie,” and already Trump is bent on doing to that phrase what he did to “fake news” back in 2017 right after taking office.  Remember that?  “Fake news” had become a phrase used to describe the lies and propaganda put out by Fox News and right-wing websites like Breitbart and the Drudge Report during the campaign.  And then there was Trump at his first news conference pointing to CNN and NBC and CBS and the New York Times and the Washington Post and calling them “fake news,” flipping the phrase upside down and backwards where it stayed for the next four years.

Now he’s at it again:  Trump put out a statement on Monday that “The Fraudulent Presidential Election of 2020 will be, from this day forth, known as THE BIG LIE!”  Liz Cheney almost immediately fired back with this tweet:  “The 2020 presidential election was not stolen. Anyone who claims it was is spreading THE BIG LIE, turning their back on the rule of law, and poisoning our democratic system.”

But the mistake Cheney is making, and the mistake Democrats will be making if they continue to use the phrase “big lie,” is that they’re arguing the issue, while Trump is simply murdering the language. 

This stuff isn’t as much propaganda or indoctrination at this point for Republicans as it is a catechism, a test of belief.  Either you recite the verses and psalms of the Book of Trump or you’re out, like Liz Cheney will be next week when she loses the challenge to her leadership of the House Republican Conference.  McCarthy and his Republican brethren, including Mitch McConnell who wants to regain the position of Majority Leader in the senate as badly as his pal Kevin wants the speakership of the House, are taking a gigantic gamble.  They are throwing every dollar they’ve got into the pot and betting that backing the single most unpopular president in the last 50 years will be enough to carry them to victory not only in 2022, but in 2024, when that same unpopular ex-president is expected to dominate the Republican Party presidential sweepstakes and seize the nomination and run again.

Of course they’re backing up this shaky strategy with a coast-to-coast campaign to limit the ability of Democrats to turn out their voters in the upcoming elections.  But that effort assumes there won’t be a corresponding backlash by Democratic voters against Republican efforts to restrict their votes, like there was last year, when Democrats turned out in record numbers in the middle of the worst pandemic in 100 years to send Trump packing and regain control of the Senate by taking back both senate seats in the state of Georgia against all expectations.

Meanwhile, Facebook has maintained Trump’s suspension and he remains banned from Twitter, thus removing two of Trump’s most important political engines, not only of spreading lies, but of raising money.  Republicans are going to cry foul and yell and scream about “free speech” and discrimination against “conservatives.”  But the only “conservative” banned from either social media platform is Donald Trump.  Facebook’s top performing pages over the last few days are all conservatives – Ben Shapiro, Fox News, Dan Bongino, Sean Hannity, and ForAmerica, a right-wing website run by L. Brent Bozell.  The only liberal is Rachel Maddow, and she is number 10 in the Facebook top 10.

Going all-in on Donald Trump also assumes that Liz Cheney and Republicans like her don’t have any support of their own, and that voters won’t notice when their jobs come back and their paychecks go up and the bar down the block is once again fully open for business and featuring local rock and roll bands and is filled with happy customers.

Good luck with that.