Trump’s “Big Lie” Continues To Damage Our Democracy
Fred Wertheimer’s Weekly Note | August 11, 2022
We don’t know if former President Donald Trump ever studied Joseph Goebbels, but he certainly does practice Goebbels’ methods.
Goebbels was Germany’s Reich Minister of Propaganda from 1933 to 1945. The concept of “The Big Lie” has been attributed to him as has this definition of it: “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.”
Trump emerged on the national scene practicing The Big Lie when he became a leading voice of the birther movement, calling repeatedly, starting in 2011, for President Obama to produce a “long-form” birth certificate and promoting the lie that Obama was not born in the United States.
In 2016, Trump pivoted to a new lie, falsely claiming that Hillary Clinton was responsible for the Obama “birther” claim.
(Trump’s history of lying goes back even further. In the early 1980s, Trump was lying about his wealth to improve his placement on the Forbes 400. Lying is, we have learned, his m.o.)
During his presidency, Trump functioned as a pathological liar, making 30,573 false or misleading claims, according to The Washington Post. And this was just a prelude to the biggest Big Lie in the history of American politics in terms of its impact on our democracy.
Months before the 2020 election, President Trump started claiming that the only way he could lose the presidential election was if it was “rigged.” From the minute it became clear that he had lost the election to this very day, Trump has been on an Orwellian path.
He used his claims that the presidency had been stolen from him to pursue various attempts to steal the presidency, culminating in the violent insurrectionist attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021.
Trump has continued to perpetuate his Big Lie to the point that approximately 70 percent of Republicans believe Joe Biden is not the legitimate President. And what is perhaps most remarkable and most dangerous is the fact that Trump has achieved this demagogic result without a shred of evidence.
Trump has multiple purposes in continuing the Big Lie.
He apparently is working to set the stage to steal the election in 2024, should he run and lose again. His “stolen election” claim has helped keep his base fully on board and has created a national movement of “election denying” candidates who are seeking public office around the country.
A large number of these candidates have won Republican primaries, and, if successful in November, some will be in a position to play pivotal roles in administering the 2024 presidential election and to help steal the election for Trump if that becomes necessary.
Trump’s Big Lie also has had profound impact at the state level in serving as the pretense for a number of states to enact voter suppression and election sabotage laws that are intended to greatly tilt the electoral system to Republicans.
This week, we saw Trump incite his followers with yet another lie.
Employing his long tradition of attacking anyone who challenges him, Trump claimed that the FBI agents who searched his Mar-a-Lago home after obtaining a judge-approved search warrant could have planted evidence there – once again making a claim without a shred of evidence.
But the most damage done by Trump’s Big Lie is in undermining the confidence of tens of millions of Americans in the integrity of our elections and, ultimately, in our democracy.
Trump has built a political army to reject the rule of law, attack our democracy, and undermine the American experiment in self-government that began more than 230 years ago.
Trump must be held accountable for his transgressions against the American people.
________________________
Fred’s Weekly Note appears each Thursday in Wertheimer’s Political Report, a Democracy 21 newsletter. Read this week’s newsletter here. And, subscribe for free here and receive your copy each week via email.
