Trump’s real revolution: Endless proactice lying works.

I’m guessing I’m singing to the choir about at least one aspect of the following:

Americans — and people all over the globe — have long, long been fed colossal amounts of lies. We’re basted in them. Dunked and redunked in them. Washed and dried in them. But, in my view, a majority of those lies are acts of omission, not commission. As in, we’re not being told the truth about what the Powers that Be are doing in the public and private sectors. Or the why, when, where, to whom and for whom. It’s the unsaid more often than not. It’s the secret coups, renditions, the horrors in our carceral system, in migrant detention centers (more aptly called concentration camps), in our factory farms, our dying ecosystems, our battlefields, etc. etc.

None of this has gone away under Trump. He hasn’t lifted a finger to try to make any of that go away. The Unsaid still reigns. But Trump has weaponized the other side of lying, the commission side, in ways we’ve simply never encountered before, and it seems to be working, and not just with his “base.”

For decades, he’s been lying through his teeth, endlessly, proactively, telling us how horrible his opponents are, how they’re all out to get him, and how utterly heroic and amazing he is, and all the things he’s done for us. On an average day, Trump will repeat or add roughly 15 new lies. Watch him in those recent pressers on Covid-19 and it’s stunning how he manages to fit so many into a given sentence, and even though he’s been repeatedly fact-checked and debunked, he won’t quit. He even goes bigger. Like Thursday when he said that before this pandemic, we had the greatest economy in the history of the world. It’s not even the greatest in the last six or seven years. But on and on he goes.

Or, when he says the “We gave” this or that governor this or that amount of equipment, or “We built them” hospitals, etc. etc. None of that has actually happened yet. Or when he takes credit for things that happened ten years ago, that he actually inherited from previous administrations. All of these things have been debunked, but he repeats them anyway, and it’s working. Some recent polls have him over 50% approval for the first time.

There is also his constant lying about what people say about him, that governors and mayors supposedly praise him effusively when they haven’t.

The list of his proactive, affirmative lies of commission is endless. He’s pushing 20,000 at this point.

So, I wonder: Will all future “leaders” apply these (ugly, perverse, tragic) lessons? Will they note how Trump gets away with endless lies of commission, and follow suit? Will they go beyond the norm of lying via not telling us the truth, and add fact-less, absurd, demonstrably false assertions on a Trumpian scale?

My bet, generalized and boiled down: The political right will, the GOP will, but the Dems will tiptoe gingerly into the new 1984 reality. They’ll be, again, in general, too skeered to go full on Trump. And it will cost them at the ballot box. If the actual left could mount an effective opposition to both parties, this wouldn’t matter, and the entire world would benefit. But I fear that the hard-right will triumph, and even the corporatist center is preferable to that.