HOW THE GOP BECAME THE PARTY OF THE LIE
Donald Trump set a new standard for defeated presidents: refuse to concede, claim fraud with no evidence, attack election officials and challenge in court. And even when the allegations of fraud are the fraud, fellow party members in Congress will join in the disgrace. This should have surprised no one, writes Stuart Stevens, author of “It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump.” The 45th president did not change the GOP, Mr. Stevens argues, “as much as he gave the party permission to reveal its true self.”
The nature and extent of Mr. Trump’s influence on the Republican Party has become clear as only 17 Republican members of Congress — 10 in the House and seven in the Senate — voted to impeach the president for his role in the Jan. 6 siege on the Capitol. A party that claims to love the Constitution remains committed to a man who violated his oath of office to protect and defend the Constitution by inciting a mob to intimidate Congress and steal the election based upon lies that he spread. But, hey, he cut the marginal tax rates for corporations.
“How do you abandon deeply held beliefs about character, personal responsibility, foreign policy and the national debt in a matter of months?” Mr. Stevens asks. The answer is that those beliefs were never deeply held. “In the end, the Republican Party rallied behind Mr. Trump because that was the deal needed to regain power.”
The GOP used to be defined by Ronald Reagan, who made conservatives believe that words had meaning. Thanks to the scourge of Mr. Trump, Republicans now send a clear message that lying is useful and productive. Consider Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley. A GOP striver, he put his finger to the wind and decided that his political ascension in our feckless political climate would be best realized if he began promoting doubts about the legitimacy of the 2020 election. Learning from Mr. Trump, Mr. Hawley insinuated and suggested and repeatedly objected to the outcome of the election.
Challenging Pennsylvania’s electoral votes, Mr. Hawley claimed that the expansion of mail-in voting in 2019 violated the state’s constitution. Even after Pennsylvania’s Republican Sen. Pat Toomey made clear that the Republicanled state Legislature and the governor deemed it consistent with state law, Mr. Hawley signed onto an objection that he refused to actually defend on the Senate floor. If Mr. Hawley was as concerned with “election integrity” as he claimed, he would have looked straight into the C-SPAN camera and condemned the fact that Mr. Trump pressured the Georgia secretary of state to “find” him 11,780 votes.
Mr. Trump and the GOP have merged seamlessly, just as the real and unreal have become indistinguishable in the fantasyland of American politics. As the GOP’s standard bearer, Mr. Trump spread lies, misinformation, paranoia and conspiracy theories, the acceptance of which by so many voters “is just one station in the slaughterhouse of truth that is the Trump presidency,” Mr. Stevens writes. “Once there is no challenge to the craziest of ideas that have no basis in fact, it is easy for Mr. Trump to take one small bit of truth and spin it into an elaborate fantasy.”
The moral rot and nihilism at the core of the national GOP has been exposed, but there are popular Republican governors today in solidly Democratic states — Larry Hogan of Maryland, Phil Scott of Vermont and Charlie Baker of Massachusetts. The governors are “the last outposts of a dying civilization, the socially moderate, fiscally conservative Republican Party,” Mr. Stevens writes. “Their greatest electoral difficulties lie not with the larger electorate but within their own party.” The national GOP remained aloof to the success of these men as Mr. Trump gave tweets in the night.
The Republican Party once had clear values: fiscal responsibility, free trade, strength in its stance on Russia and moral character. The brazen indifference that Republicans have shown in abandoning these principles proves that Mr. Stevens was right, it’s about power. And we know that when these principles were used as a cudgel against political opponents, it was all a lie.