The Dark Side of Politics: The GOP's MAGA Lie Machine

Trump’s Legacy and the Weaponization of Lies in the 2024 Election

The song that was inspired by this article is available here.
My reading this article as an audio podcast is available here.

Hitler’s brilliant propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, famously told the Fuhrer, “Repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth.” Donald Trump and the MAGA faction of the Republican Party have taken Goebbels’ advice to heart, and it’s going to make this fall’s election one like we’ve never seen before.

Already they’ve been lying so often and so effectively that nearly all Republicans, and majorities or near-majorities of Americans, believe:

— the GOP lie that we’re in a recession (we’re in better shape, in most ways, than any time since the 1960s and inflation last month was zero while Ronald Reagan never got it below 4.1% in his entire eight years);
— Republican lies about crime being up (it’s down dramatically since Trump);
— their lies that “Democrats want elective abortion up to the moment of birth” (none have ever said that);
— Trump’s lie that the 2020 election was “stolen” from Trump by “voter fraud”;
— GOP lies that the southern border is “wide open”;
— the Republican lie that Social Security is on the verge of bankruptcy and must be saved by privatization or benefits cuts;
— their vicious lie that queer people are pedophiles targeting America’s schoolchildren; and
— their NRA lie that more and more deadly guns will keep our kids safe.

At the level of presidential politics, it’s gotten so brazen that Trump is actually asking people if they’re better off today than they were four years ago. That’s four years ago when people were dying from Covid that he was not handling well, the economy was in the tank, millions had lost their jobs, and people were so desperate for food they sat in their cars in 5-mile-long lines for food banks.

It’s also migrated to Congressional Republicans. As Marc Elias writes for is brilliant Democracy Docket newsletter:

“Over the last month, you can feel that something important has happened. A tipping point has been reached. Republicans who used to act like they had not heard or read the latest Trump outrage now show up at his trials and parrot his most vile lies. The GOP now openly extol the virtues of political prosecutions and disparage the rule of law.”

Even Republicans on the Supreme Court have gotten into the act. Justifying his decision to legalize bump-stocks, Clarence Thomas was so audacious as to insert this naked lie into his decision announced last Friday: “[T]he shooter must release and reset the trigger between every shot…” The whole point of a bump-stock is that you can simply hold the trigger down continuously and spray up to 800 bullets a minute.

Tragically for American politics, as former Republican strategist and attorney George Conway recently noted, “[T]he Republican Party has become addicted to lies under Trump.”

Americans are generally used to believing their politicians are telling the truth, albeit often a slightly shaded version for political convenience.

When Kennedy debated Nixon in 1960, the former Vice President honestly argued that he believed the best way to end the segregation of lunch counters in the South was for the president to call them up and ask them to be kind to Black people. Senator Kennedy honestly said he believed it would take the force of federal power to get Southern racists to follow the law.

When Reagan promised us that massive, budget-busting, deficit-creating tax cuts for the morbidly rich would “pay for themselves” and “produce a more general prosperity” as they “trickled down” to average working people, he probably believed it was true. Americans thought so; we’ve left Reaganomics largely in place for all of the 43 years since then.

When George W. Bush and Dick Cheney sold us on the naked lie that Iraq’s Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and was implicitly involved in 9/11, more than half of America went along with it because we’ve been conditioned to believe our political leaders tell the truth. At least there was a grain of truth in that case: Reagan had illegally sold Hussein weapons of mass destruction that he then used against his own Kurdish citizens and, for all Bush and Cheney knew, some were still around.

But what happens when politicians stop bothering with even a fig-leaf of truth to justify a giant, world-altering lie (like Bush’s and Cheney’s) and, instead, just make things up out of whole cloth? How can a political system survive such an assault on the truth?

James “Father of the Constitution” Madison warned us about the danger of a special interest group (“faction”) or political party adopting lies as a political tool; it was already happening in his day, with wild rumors circulating about the content of the new Constitution he’d helped write and was then not yet ratified. In Federalist 10, he wrote:

“The instability, injustice, and confusion introduced into the public councils, have, in truth, been the mortal diseases under which popular governments have everywhere perished; as they continue to be the favorite and fruitful topics from which the adversaries to liberty derive their most specious declamations.”

The last time the GOP embraced outright lies in a widespread way like this was in the lead-up to America’s participation in World War II, as multiple Republican senators, representatives, and media figures were taking direct cash bribes and talking points from Hitler’s intelligence service. (Rachel Maddow has documented much of this in her book Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism and her podcast Ultra.)

In response, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, on October 23, 1940, warned the nation:

“Truthful campaign discussion of public issues is essential to the American form of Government; but wilful misrepresentation of fact has no place either during election time or at any other time.”

Roosevelt noted that multiple Republicans had taken Goebbel’s advice and thought they could beat him and his Democrats by simply telling bald-faced lies:

“Certain techniques of propaganda, created and developed in dictator countries, have been imported into this campaign. It is the very simple technique of repeating and repeating and repeating falsehoods, with the idea that by constant repetition and reiteration, with no contradiction, the misstatements will finally come to be believed.”

In Roosevelt’s time there was a rightwing press, but it was mostly fringe. There were no media giants owned by foreign billionaires willing to regularly lie to the American people for billions in profit. Between the Fairness Doctrine that required stations to “broadcast in the public interest” and the Equal Time Rule, our media was generally dedicated to telling actual truth in what they called News.

Therefore, Roosevelt said, he was confident Americans wouldn’t fall for the GOP lies that supported Hitler and promoted Nazism here at home:

“Dictators have had great success in using this technique; but only because they were able to control the press and the radio, and to stifle all opposition. That is why I cannot bring myself to believe that in a democracy like ours, where the radio and a part of the press—I repeat, where the radio and a part of the press—remain open to both sides, repetition of deliberate misstatements will ever prevail.”

Today’s press bears little resemblance to the media of the 1940s. Over 1,500 rightwing and 800 religious radio stations and hundreds of rightwing television stations daily sing the praises of Trump and the GOP, repeating the latest insane lies as if they’re gospel truth. Russian, Iranian, and Chinese trolls dominate political discussions on social media, along with a bizarre South African billionaire who appears fond of Nazis messaging lies to Americans on his social media platform.

This has created the perfect opening for a soulless Republican Party and its MAGA candidates to fully embrace Goebbels’ Big Lie strategy. And they’re doing it with gusto.

Former Republican Congressman Adam Kinzinger writes on his Substack blog:

“In the latest how-low-can-they-go, the GOP and Fox News seem to have worked together to distribute a maliciously doctored bit of video that targets President Biden’s mental capacity. The video supposedly shows him wandering away from other leaders at the G-7 summit in Italy, as if he doesn’t quite know where he is and what’s going on.”

In fact, the entire video in context shows no such thing, but the deceptive edit used by Republicans and Fox “News” seems to “prove” that Biden is “losing it.”

MAGA Republican US Senate candidate Royce White is so certain the dozens of rightwing media in Minnesota will back up his lies about his failure to pay child support that, when confronted with them by Daily Beast reporter Rachel Olding, “he argued that one of his testicles garners more ‘media attention’ than The Daily Beast.”

In a transparent effort to prevent fact-checking of GOP lies, congressional Republicans launched an inquiry into the Stanford Internet Laboratory, the gold-standard organization for determining the veracity of political information circulating online. That was followed by a lawsuit from Stephen Miller’s America First Legal and a second one that is heading for the Supreme Court.

The Washington Post reports that the Observatory is shutting down its operations, having been financially crippled by the cost of the Republican lawsuits and the congressional investigation. The organization that was the first to out Russian online support for Trump in 2016 will soon be no more:

“Two ongoing lawsuits and two congressional inquiries into the Observatory have cost Stanford millions of dollars in legal fees, one of the people told The Washington Post. Students and scholars affiliated with the program say they have been worn down by online attacks and harassment amid the heated political climate for misinformation research, as [Republican] legislators threaten to cut federal funding to universities studying propaganda.”

This fall’s election will be like none we’ve ever seen before in American history. Already Fox and other rightwing outlets are using doctored videos, Trump has published multiple deepfakes, and across the GOP there’s a full-on commitment to reciting easily debunked lies.

They’ll continue doing this right up to election day and beyond because they know that Goebbel’s advice actually works.

Most concerning, it’s impossible to know in advance what their next lie will be. But you can bet it will be more malicious then the Bush campaign’s amplifying slurs on John Kerry’s Vietnam war service record, or Trump’s despicable, racist, birther attacks on Obama.

Now that so much of our media is so frequently failing to call out GOP lies, and the nation’s #1 cable channel revels in repeating lies for profit, the pushback against this evil, democracy-destroying strategy falls to us.

Get ready, and pass it on…