The Trump Lie Machine Is Broken

Trump's signature methods of smearing, exploiting, and pandering are suddenly getting him nowhere.

(Photo by ADAM GRAY/AFP via Getty Images)

It shouldn’t have taken a year, let alone nine, for political elites to stop getting snookered by Donald Trump.

I say that as someone with very low expectations. Being an easy mark is part of the price of admission to the heights of American discourse. For a decade before Trump took over the GOP, I watched national political reporters bobble their heads in unison when Republican leaders insisted “deficits don’t matter” (because the president was a Republican) then bobble their heads some more when Republicans decried deficits as a threat to American security (because the president was a Democrat), never once catching on that their sources were just lying. They had no firm convictions on significant matters of public policy. It was all rank opportunism.

But under Trump’s tutelage, things degenerated rapidly. Republicans weren’t just situationally inconsistent about fiscal policy—to their credit, they’ve mustered surprisingly little fake umbrage over deficits during Joe Biden’s presidency. Instead, they began lying and bullshitting about everything.

And still, frustratingly, national political reporters far too often accepted their claims and pseudoutrages at face value. Republicans could pretend to care about democracy or Hunter Biden’s influence peddling and media elites would seldom notice that they were taking orders from Donald Trump, the insurrection-leading felon who made his presidency a conduit for bribes.

But for the past two months lying hasn’t gotten Trump and his loyalists nearly as far as they’ve grown accustomed to. Finally.

BOUNCING OFF THE WALZ

To me the first tell that something had changed came a bit after Kamala Harris took the helm of the Democratic Party.

Yes, Republicans tried and failed to trip her at the starting line. They peddled innuendo and attacked her mercilessly, to no avail. But to some extent, I don’t think that was a fair test. Harris benefitted from an enormous groundswell of support from relieved Democrats when she launched her campaign. She wasn’t the best-known Democrat in America, but she wasn’t unknown, and she’d been well vetted—all of which would have made it challenging for Republicans to define her under any circumstances. She’s thus seen her favorability numbers climb from 17 points under water to break even or better, a reversal that’s simply unheard of absent airplanes flying into the World Trade Center. You can hardly fault Republicans for failing to stop a force of nature.

The GOP effort to destroy Tim Walz, by contrast, seems like it should have paid off.

Perhaps in recognition of how little they had to work with against Harris, Republicans spent more time in the month prior to the Democratic convention subjecting Walz—the running mate—to swift-boat style smears than they did attacking the top of the ticket.

Walz had no national profile. They plucked a handful of comments and innocent misstatements he made over his 20 year political career out of context to disparage his military service and portray him as a faker. They lied about his gubernatorial record, and tried to insinuate that he was a predator and a pervert. They deployed the same kinds of tactics that helped Republicans defame and defeat John Kerry, Max Cleland, Hillary Clinton, and other high-profile Democrats over the years.

And yet…. Today, Walz is the most favorably viewed of the four candidates at the top of the ticket, and the only one who’s been consistently popular. It all amounted to nothing.

The pro-Trump propagandist Christopher Rufo, who is renown for confessing proudly to the ulterior motives of right-wing activists, lamented earlier this month that these tried-and-true GOP tactics had suddenly stopped working.

Note his admission that Walz hadn’t done anything scandalous per se. The tragedy, in Rufo’s mind, is that Republicans can no longer dependably scandalize their enemies with concerted bullshit.

And that’s entirely because Donald Trump exposed the ruse. America is not beyond scandal, but we may finally have moved beyond taking Trump loyalists at their word, or pretending they have any kind of consistent ethic.

DONALD, STUMPED

For the same reason, Republicans have been unable to exploit the fact that Trump has been the target of at least one, and seemingly two, assassination attempts this summer.

Trump is incapable of garnering sympathy in a fair-game sense. A more chastened person could have responded to the Butler, PA, shooting with honorable public reflection. He might have conceded to bearing some responsibility for the fevered, gun-drenched climate in America. He might have talked about his interior life post-shooting, and the way the incident had affected him.

A Trump like that might be winning this election.

The Trump we have, and the sleazy pretenders who mimic him, have taken the opposite tack of claiming Democrats keep trying to kill him. Let’s set aside that this is gross and untrue. The main thing is: Nobody outside Trump’s existing pool of supporters has time for his shit anymore. Everyone at some level knows that he sowed the maelstroms that now threaten to sweep him into oblivion. We know that libel is second nature to him. We (including apparently most swing voters) have simply decided not to enter what

TPM

’s Josh Marshall has called Trump’s reality-distortion field.

I think this is why Trump can’t seem to pander his way back into contention, either. As his polls have slipped, he’s begun promising spoils to a bunch of different constituencies (but particularly to young men). No taxes on tips, overtime, Social Security benefits. Did ya hear, he’s gonna repeal the cap on the state-and-local tax deduction, too? A cap he imposed in his first term? He’s also going to make it so that young men can pay pennies for their health insurance by making everyone else’s insurance much more expensive. Etc Etc.

The tally would plunge the U.S. into an inflationary crisis, and quickly destroy Social Security and Medicare.

Everyone who doesn’t already plan to vote for him can see that the promises are empty. They appear to be accomplishing nothing. Too many Americans finally realized there’s no point wasting a moment on them. The most tired genre of the Trump years is the dispatch from Trump Country, where Trump supporters still support Donald Trump. Today we could create a new one: The dispatch from everywhere else, where no matter what he says, we don’t.