Donald Trump is a compulsive liar, and he has also compelled others to do the same on his behalf.
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For Donald Trump, lying is compulsive. It is a part of his mental illness, and the former president, who lacks a moral compass and seems unable to distinguish right from wrong, may not even realize that he is doing it.
In other words, he probably can’t help it.
Of course, that’s not an excuse.
If you suffer from pedophilia and want to avoid doing harm to others, then you should stay away from children. Conversely, if you are a lying sociopath, then you should refrain from leading political movements. History has shown that this never ends well.
For completely different reasons, most Republicans and right-wing figures also seem to have a real problem with being able to tell the truth these days.
In their case, lying is not compulsive but rather compulsory, and mental illness is not an excuse.
If you want to get ahead in today’s GOP (i.e., stay in Trump’s good graces), or if you want to make your money in the MAGA movement, you must repeat his lies.
It doesn’t really matter what they are: Migrants eat pets, Kamala Harris personally invited 13,099 murderers into the US and then set them free, red is not a color, Trump won the election, FEMA trains monkeys to stuff ballot boxes, and so on.
It also doesn’t matter that none of it makes sense… the price of admission into the upper echelons of the right-wing movement is that you have to at least nod along when crazy Uncle Don makes stuff up. Of course, to really be somebody, you have to repeat the lie loudly and proudly.
Fortunately for these “leaders,” the people they are lying to are reality-averse and embrace those lies because modern conservatives have been conditioned to embrace dishonesty and to not ask questions (sadly, the rest of Americans are also not doing all that great when it comes to fact-checking).
To the MAGA core, it is much more important that something feels true (or could be) than that it is.
This also means that it is easier to lie to them than tell the truth. For example, try standing in front of a MAGA audience and insist that Trump lost the 2020 election handily.
Still, unless you are a terrible person (which also seems to help one get ahead in today’s GOP), all that dishonesty must be absolutely exhausting.
After all, lying is hard, especially about big stuff — or at least it should be.
Surely, all of our readers (and writers) have told lies before.
In most cases, they were (hopefully) told for one’s own benefit and did not harm anybody else. For example, “I did not eat that cookie,” is a much more benign lie than “I saw Morgan eat the cookie.”
If you tell the former, you should feel a little bit bad. If you tell the latter, however, and get Morgan in trouble, then you should feel really bad.
It’s the same with Trump’s lies.
It is one thing to falsely claim that the economy in 2020 was the greatest in history, but it’s another to scapegoat immigrants or make Americans in need of disaster assistance distrust the government.
In those cases, real people are being harmed and the consequences can be deadly. Trump may be too mentally ill to realize that, but his hangers-on should know better. Many of them must realize that they are actively and passively hurting the country and their own supporters.
Of course, within the MAGAverse, there are different kinds of liars… and they should be feeling various degrees of shame for their role in all this.
On the one end of the spectrum, you have people like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), i.e., clueless idiots.
Greene probably believes most of what Trump says because it fits in perfectly with how she views the world. She is “doing her own research,” which leads her to the conclusion that the government operates weather-controlling machines (and any number of other crazy things).
Believe it or not, that makes her the least odious cog in this GOP’s lying machine.
On the other end of the spectrum, you have people like Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) or former and future presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy.
Those guys aren’t idiots. They are Ivy League-educated demagogues who know exactly what they are doing. To them, lying is part of a strategy to build a bigger MAGA following so that they can succeed Trump.
Obviously, that includes participating in the Big Lie, but also much smaller ones.
For example, here is Ramaswamy amplifying the lie that Vice President Kamala Harris used a teleprompter during a recent town hall.
Kamala Harris uses a teleprompter during “town hall.” The worst part of this episode is that it’s entirely unsurprising. https://t.co/TcZyOgiB6e
— Vivek Ramaswamy (@VivekGRamaswamy) October 11, 2024
It’s a great example of a MAGA lie because it is so easy to believe for conservatives who are certain that Harris is a puppet in cahoots with the media.
There is just one problem: It’s completely false.
And, in the case of this tweet, it had been known for some time already that it was false.
But that didn’t stop Ramaswamy from tweeting it out to his 2.7 million followers. That is, in his own words, “totally unsurprising.”
While people like him and Cruz are in it for power, others just want to make a buck. Obviously, above all, that means Fox News, which is raking in billions from selling a false reality to conservative dupes.
But there is an entire ecosystem out there consisting of right-wing influencers who are trying to get their piece of the pie. To them, there is no lie too egregious to not repeat it.
And they obviously don’t care that, in the process, they are hurting the country that they want to “make great again.”
