On
Trump’s Big Lie
May
28, 2021
Donald Trump is
no longer President of the United States, thank God. He has however maintained
a rabid following by propagating a Big Lie in the style of tyrants like Stalin
and Hitler. Stalin’s big lie was that the Communist Party represented and
advocated the interests of the working class. Hitler’s big lie was that the
Jews were responsible for all of Germany’s problems. Trump’s Big Lie is that he
actually won the 2020 presidential election in a landslide and that his victory
has been stolen from him. That’s not true. Tyrants’ big lies never are. There
isn’t a shred of evidence to support Trump’s claim. Nonetheless, millions of
Americans, almost all of them Republicans, have accepted the claim as the
truth. We are then faced with two significant questions, namely, how do we
explain people clinging to an obviously false claim and what do we do about.
In his book His
Truth is Marching On, John Lewis and the Power of Hope, presidential
historian Jon Meacham gives us a quote from American author Walker Percy in an
article in Harper’s in the spring of 1965. Percy was writing about racism in Mississippi
in the 1960s, but his words have broader application. Meacham quotes Percy as
having written:
‘Once the final break is made between language and reality,
arguments generate their own force and lay out their own logical rules. The
current syllogism goes something like this: (1) There is no ill-feeling in
Mississippi between the races; the Negroes like things the way they are, if you
don’t believe it I’ll call my cook out of the kitchen and you can ask her. (2)
The trouble is caused by outside agitators who are communist-inspired. (3)
Therefore, the real issue is between atheistic communism and patriotic,
God-fearing Mississippians. Once such a system cuts the outside wires and
begins to rely on its own feedback, anything becomes possible.’[1]
Percy’s analysis
applies perfectly to the dynamics of Donald Trump’s Big Lie. It helps us
understand how so many Americans can cling to a claim that is obviously false. When
we apply this analysis to our current Big Lie we get the following syllogism:
(1) President Trump won the 2020 presidential election and remains the
legitimate president. (2)Democrats stole his election victory from him. (3)
Therefore, the real struggle today is between God-fearing, patriotic Trump
supporters and dishonest Democrats who will do anything to gain power so they
can impose socialism on the country. This claim that Trump won the election
certainly has made a “break between language and reality.” The claim’s language
is that Trump really won. The reality is that he really lost. Joe Biden won the
election fair and square. There isn’t a shred of evidence that says otherwise. Trump’s
Big Lie denies that reality, and it seems not to matter at all to its adherents
that the Big Lie hangs suspended in midair with no connection to reality, to
what really happened in the 2020 election. That Trump really won the election
is no more solid a claim than was the claim Percy used that there was no
ill-feeling between the races in Mississippi in the 1960s. The only way anyone
can accept the premise of either lie, Trump’s or Mississippi racists’, is by
ignoring or denying obvious reality.
Once you accept
the Big Lie as true, however, this claim does exactly what Percy said racism
did in the Jim Crow south. It generates its own force and creates its own
logic. If Trump really won the election but Biden was sworn in as president, it
simply must be true that someone stole the election from Trump. That’s not true
of course. No one stole an election from anyone, but the belief that someone
did steal the election from Trump fits perfectly into the logic of the Big Lie.
There is no evidence that anyone stole the election, but all that matters to
those who believe the Big Lie is that it makes sense within the Big Lie’s
logic. If the first proposition is true, then logically the second proposition
must also be true.
Within the logic
of the Big Lie the third assertion must also be true. Those who are trying to
undo the supposedly fraudulent results of the 2020 presidential election are
the true patriots. In the logic of the Big Lie those who have tried first to
stop the certification of Joe Biden as president, then to overturn the election
results and put Trump back in office, are the ones fighting to preserve
American democracy. Within this logic, what could be more patriotic than
fighting to assure that the actual winner of the election is declared to be the
winner of the election? Preserving American democracy, this logic says, is so
important that drastic measures are called for. The people who stormed the
Capitol on January 6 weren’t trying to overthrow the US government. They were
trying to protect American democracy from a nefarious plot by the socialist
Democrats to steal the election.
The vital need to
preserve democracy, this logic says, justifies Republican led states passing
laws with the obvious intent and result of restricting the vote of people who
by and large don’t vote for Republicans. I justified state Republican parties
hiring totally unqualified right-wing hacks to conduct bogus “audits” of a
state’s ballots. These phony “auditors” will certainly claim that they have discovered
proof that Trump really won the election. It matters not in the logic of the
Big Lie that the “auditors” had reached their desired conclusion before they
got their hands on the ballots. It matters not to this logic that these “audits”
are not impartial efforts to find the truth but wholly partisan efforts to
support an a priori truth, namely, that Trump won the election. The proponents
of the Big Lie are already convinced of a truth they will let no reality contradict.
That “truth” is that Trump won the election and someone has stolen his victory
from him. Everything else that the Trump supporters say flows logically from
the Big Lie. Within the logic of that lie anything Trump’s supporters do to try
to pull an election victory from the jaws of defeat makes perfect sense and is
fully justified.
We are faced
therefore with a most difficult situation. The proponents of the Big Lie will
not be persuaded by evidence that the Lie is just that, a lie. The lack of
impartial evidence to support the Big Lie won’t persuade them. To them their
candidate won but was fraudulently declared the loser. They bought the Big Lie
not because there’s evidence that makes it true but because their Dear Leader
Donald Trump says the lie is actually truth. Against all the evidence they will
continue to believe the Big Lie for as long as Trump keeps asserting it as
truth.
How then do we
defeat the Big Lie? The big lie of southern racism was defeated (to the limited
extent that it has been defeated) by federal legislation and by a change of attitude
by a sufficient number of Americans over decades of time. Trump’s Big Lie is
sufficiently different from the big lie of southern racists that the same
tactics won’t work against it. There is nothing for federal legislation to
prohibit, at least not without violating the First Amendment. We don’t have
decades of time in which to defeat Trump’s Big Lie. That’s true in part because
of Trump’s age. As I write this essay in May, 2021, he is 74 years old. He
surely won’t live another fifty years, which is roughly the amount of time
after the civil rights movement of the 1960s that it has taken the country to
get over its heritage of racism even a little bit. We don’t have that kind of
time also because of the threat the Big Lie poses to American democracy. We don’t
know what those who believe the lie will do. They’ve already rioted at the
Capitol once in an attempt to stop a branch of the federal government from
performing its constitutional duty. There’s no particular reason to believe
they won’t try something else like that again. Government forces can almost
certainly defeat them should the matter come once again to violence, but that
doesn’t guarantee that some fanatical adherents to the Big Lie won’t resort to
violence again. We don’t have decades of time also because the Big Lie serves
to undermine public confidence in our democratic system of government. We
simply cannot allow it to continue if there is any way to stop it.
The only things I
can see that might stop it all have to do with Donald Trump. He made up the Big
Lie and continues to espouse it every chance he gets. He is its focus and the
source of most of its energy. Were he to die (which I pray would happen only
from natural causes of course), the Big Lie might just fade into the oblivion
it so richly deserves. The same thing might happen if Trump doesn’t die but
gets convincingly discredited. He is already a defendant in several significant
civil cases. He faces criminal investigations in New York and Georgia. Perhaps
if he were convicted of a crime he’d lose much of the luster the proponents of
the Big Lie see in him, and the Big Lie might at least lose some of its
support.
Beyond these
possibilities the only thing we who see clearly can do is to continue to
operate within our democratic, constitutional system of government and make
sure that it remains as free, open, and uncorrupt as it has been through most
of the country’s history (Jim Crow suppression of the vote of Black Americans
and the denial of the vote to women until 1920 being the two major instances in
which the system didn’t work the way it is supposed to). We must keep asserting
the truth that the Big Lie is just that, a lie. In addition we must never again
elect as president a person like Donald Trump, one who is so morally corrupt
with an ego that is both very big and very weak at the same time. We must never
again elect someone who will resort to the totalitarian tactics of the Big Lie to
remain in power the way Trump has. We can have confidence that try as it might
the Big Lie will not destroy American democracy, and we can pray that that
confidence is not misplaced. American democracy today faces its most serious
threat at least since the Civil War. We must do everything we can to assure
that it will survive that threat.
[1] Walker
Percy, quoted in Jon Meacham, His Truth is Marching On, John Lewis and the
Power of Hope, (New York, Random House, 2020), p. 158.
No comments:
Post a Comment