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Opinion | Trump Is Alone With His Big Lie - The New York Times

  
Via:  John Russell  •  3 years ago  •  10 comments

By:   Thomas L. Friedman (nytimes)

Opinion | Trump Is Alone With His Big Lie - The New York Times
Most election deniers who lost last week have conceded and did not claim fraud. That doesn't absolve them from embracing Trump's Big Lie in the first place.

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S E E D E D   C O N T E N T


By Thomas L. Friedman

Opinion Columnist

I got a little emotional voting this year.

First, I went to the wrong neighborhood school, where a poll worker carefully searched for my name and then explained that I was registered at the Bethesda elementary school down the road. When I got there, a team of volunteers — my neighbors, from eager 20-somethings to gray-haired retirees — patiently explained how to mark the paper ballot. When my cellphone suddenly rang, they practically strangled me: "Shut that off!!!"

This was the best of America — these people, this process, carried out with integrity and solemnity. What a privilege to be able to vote this way.

And what an absurdity that it was these very same people and this very same process that Donald Trump spent the past two years smearing and undermining, managing to bring a majority of his party along with him in his giant, fraudulent claim that the 2020 election was stolen from him.

But wait — where was Trump last week?

Did you hear allegations by him or his lackeys that these midterm elections were stolen from his handpicked candidates? Other than some baseless claims by Trump here and there, including that the failed Arizona candidate for governor Kari Lake (a clownish Trump impersonator) was being cheated, there wasn't much. Trump instead spent most of his energy denigrating some of his anointed candidates and blaming his wife and others for persuading him to endorse the bizarre collection of election-denying sycophants who became Team Trump in this election and lost almost every big race.

The fact that Trump is not today filing lawsuits onbehalf of each one to try to prove election fraud speaks volumes. It's Trump basically telling them all:

"Sorry, this lie about stolen elections only pertains to me. There is only room for one martyr in this party. You don't get to use my lie in your state elections. I only backed unprincipled, ambitious people — like you, J.D. Vance and Mehmet Oz and Doug Mastriano and Adam Laxalt — to amplify my lie in order to prove I'm not a loser. I can never be seen as a loser. If you're losers, it's your fault."

That also explains why

most of the election deniers who lost, like Oz, simply conceded and did not claim fraud. Why not raise a ruckus, Mehmet? Hey, J.D., why aren't you alleging that your Republican colleagues lost because their elections were "rigged," the way you did for Trump? What about you, Doug? What was it you said on Sunday when you conceded losing the governor's race in Pennsylvania: "Difficult to accept as the results are, there is no right course but to concede, which I do."

What? Why is that the right course today, but it wasn't the right course for Trump two years ago?

Because none of you ever believed Trump's lie to begin with, so you never dared deploy it in your own elections!

You were just renting Trump's lie on the belief that it was your golden ticket, your easy shortcut, to victory. You thought you could echo Trump's lie, get elected with the votes of his supporters and then just drop it. Now that most of you have failed to get elected on election denialism, you want us to forget how you shamefully tried to exploit that lie to gain power, while you slink away.

No, no, a thousand times no.

We must never, ever forget the damage that Donald Trump and his cynical imitators, cult followers and media amplifiers did to the reputation of our democracy, the reverence for its institutions and the unity of our society by perpetrating this Big Lie. Alone it was a shameful travesty — but to do it in the midst of a hugely stressful pandemic, when we needed more than ever to trust one another, look out for one another and work with our government to stem Covid, was criminal.

I don't think we fully understand the damage this has done to our social fabric and political system. It tore apart families at Thanksgiving dinners. It sundered longstanding friendships. It divided neighborhoods, City Councils, state assemblies,PTAs, boardrooms and newsrooms. And it distracted our whole country from the work of nation-building at home, making it next to impossible to do anything big and hard together.

It not only sullied our nation's reputation as a democracy but also motivated a mob on Jan. 6 to storm our nation's Capitol — with the expressed aim of overturning the election. Five Capitol or Metropolitan Police officers died in connection with that attack. Many of the rioters made clear afterward that they were motivated by that Big Lie. The extremist who attacked Paul Pelosi, the husband of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, in their home was marinated in election conspiracies.

It also empowered autocrats like Russia's Vladimir Putin and China's Xi Jinping and phony democrats like Hungary's Viktor Orban to strut around boasting that their own people will never have to worry about the "chaos" that democracy and voting bring.

Big Liar Trump, and all the little liars who surfed his scam for fun and profit — particularly Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch, Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity and virtually the whole Fox crew — have done incalculable damage to our country. Shame on every one of you.

And Trump now has the gall, the rancid shamelessness, to stand amid this bonfire of lies, hate and broken relationships that he ignited and declare that he's running for president again?

And now the Murdoch crew, after indulging this fraud for two years, has the gall to say, "Well, maybe we should move on to Ron DeSantis" — without any accounting for what they enabled? No, sorry. History will not be kind to you.

As David Axelrod, a former adviser to President Barack Obama, put it on CNN.com about the abandonment of Trump by some Republican politicians now that he's become a loser: Watching their "exodus from his camp, led by Rupert Murdoch and his right-wing media empire, has been something to behold. For them, trespasses against democracy and decency may be tolerated, but losing cannot."

It's why, for the first time in a long time, I now feel some hope for the American political system again. Since Trump came down that escalator in 2015, the G.O.P. establishment has tried to have it both ways: harvest the votes from Trump's base and avert their eyes from his shameful behaviors, even his denigration of our electoral system. Trump could never go too low for them because they were addicted to the votes of his base.

Well, a majority of Americans just established a floor. Or as Nick Corasaniti of The Times reported: "Every election denier who sought to become the top election official in a critical battleground state lost at the polls this year, as voters roundly rejected extreme partisans who promised to restrict voting and overhaul the electoral process."

Sure, most of Trump's cult followers still embrace his lie, because openly abandoning it in front of family, friends or co-workers is just too embarrassing. But the G.O.P. establishment is going to have to choose — keep losing with Trump or vote him off the island for DeSantis. Welcome to "Survivor: Florida."

The best part is that this reckoning was delivered not by the G.O.P. leadership — they are cowards — but by the most important and quietly courageous people in this election.

It was delivered by everyday Americans: principled Republicans and Democrats and independents, young and old, voting against the Big Lie and its perpetrators in their local voting stations, just like mine, and our principled neighbors and fellow citizens who counted the votes carefully, fairly and honestly, just the way they always did — including in 2020.

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JohnRussell
Professor Principal
1  seeder  JohnRussell    3 years ago
We must never, ever forget the damage that Donald Trump and his cynical imitators, cult followers and media amplifiers did to the reputation of our democracy, the reverence for its institutions and the unity of our society by perpetrating this Big Lie. Alone it was a shameful travesty — but to do it in the midst of a hugely stressful pandemic, when we needed more than ever to trust one another, look out for one another and work with our government to stem Covid, was criminal.
-
I don't think we fully understand the damage this has done to our social fabric and political system. It tore apart families at Thanksgiving dinners. It sundered longstanding friendships. It divided neighborhoods, City Councils, state assemblies,PTAs, boardrooms and newsrooms. And it distracted our whole country from the work of nation-building at home, making it next to impossible to do anything big and hard together.
 
 
 
Sean Treacy
Professor Principal
2  Sean Treacy    3 years ago

nical imitators, cult followers and media amplifiers did to the reputation of our democracy, the reverence for its institutions and the unity of our society 

Do you feel any guilt on behalf of your party, at all?

Or have the decades of election denial, attacking the legitimacy of the Supreme Court,  supporting riots and rioters,  lying for years about the President being a spy, boasting about the resistance within the federal government to undercut the President, using criminal porn lawyers to attack Supreme Court nominees with lies about rape gangs, excusing felonies by a President etc etc, just all been wiped from memory?  Do you ever wonder why Trump was possible in 2016 but never would would have been 20 years earlier?

 
 
 
JohnRussell
Professor Principal
2.1  seeder  JohnRussell  replied to  Sean Treacy @2    3 years ago
Do you ever wonder why Trump was possible in 2016 attacking the legitimacy of the Supreme Court,  supporting riots and rioters,  lying for years about the President being a spy, boasting about the resistance within the federal government to undercut the President, using criminal porn lawyers to attack Supreme Court nominees with lies about rape gangs,

All of that took place AFTER 2016.  So using your "logic", the election of Trump forced the other side to attack the legitimacy of the Supreme Court,  support riots and rioters,  lie for years about the President being a spy, boast about the resistance within the federal government to undercut the President,  and use criminal porn lawyers to attack Supreme Court nominees with lies about rape gangs.

 
 
 
Sean Treacy
Professor Principal
2.1.1  Sean Treacy  replied to  JohnRussell @2.1    3 years ago
ll of that took place AFTER 2016. 

The article is about the state of the nation today and the damage done to it. 

But yes, Bill Clinton and the excuses made for him made Trump possible. Remember the "character doesn't matter" argument? 

 
 
 
JohnRussell
Professor Principal
2.2  seeder  JohnRussell  replied to  Sean Treacy @2    3 years ago
It all ought to fade into the background, though, next to his attempt to throw out the votes of millions of American citizens in order to get himself installed in the presidency for another term.

That is what happened. When in fuck are right wingers going to see and admit that for god's sake? When? We dont live forever you know. 

 
 
 
JohnRussell
Professor Principal
3  seeder  JohnRussell    3 years ago

Donald Trump Announces Campaign to Inflict Himself on the Electorate a Third Time

Here we go again. 609b064c-5c45-48db-af2e-603beb23f36e_1644425675.file?fill=1:1&resize=80:* By   Jack Holmes Published: Nov 15, 2022 former-u-s-president-donald-trump-speaks-to-the-media-news-photo-1668544771.jpg?crop=0.709xw:1.00xh;0.111xw,0&resize=640:* Joe Raedle // Getty Images

At an event this evening at Mar-a-Lago, Donald J. Trump declared his candidacy for president of the United States in 2024. You may remember that he previously held the office of president between 2017 and January 2021. From the moment he announced his first run in 2015, Trump went about turning the Republican Party toward a kind of aesthetic populism: open nativism and hatred of those outside the   volk,   combined with tax cuts for rich people and corporations. The economy had finally made a full recovery from the Great Recession by the time he entered the White House, however, and strong wage gains for lower earners amid a booming stock market might have seen him re-elected, had he not thoroughly botched the 2020 pandemic response. Oh, and he also engaged in nakedly authoritarian behavior,   running roughshod over the other branches of government . While president,   he accepted payments   through his companies from foreign actors and corporate interests with business before his Executive branch. He also regularly   behaved like an insane person .

It all ought to fade into the background, though, next to his attempt to throw out the votes of millions of American citizens in order to get himself installed in the presidency for another term. Before the present campaign ramps up and the mainstream press starts to pretend that he has a plan to fix inflation, it ought to be stated for the record that he should have been barred from ever holding office again after the national disgrace of January 6. Congress could have accomplished this through impeachment, but Senate Republicans let him off. Trump has demonstrated himself to be an unacceptable candidate for any office of public trust in this country. If he would send his street goons to attack the seat of the national legislature to stay in power, what wouldn't he do to keep it if he gets hold of it again?   What will he do   now that he has a feel for the levers of power and will fully embrace his own bedrock principle that all that matters in his lieutenants is loyalty? When the political media inevitably starts covering him like just another candidate, like some guy with a plan to cut taxes and regulations, it should be called out continually as a farce and a betrayal.

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Now Trump has returned with considerable haste, as he faces the prospect of indictment in two federal investigations, as well as state inquiries in New York and Georgia. The last case is incredibly clear-cut:   In a recorded call , Trump hinted to Georgia's secretary of state that he could face jail time if he did not "find" the exact number of votes Trump needed to overturn Biden's win there. (He tried to force state officials to stuff the ballot box for him! He's on tape! There's a recording you can listen to!) He may regard getting back into the presidency as his best defense against all this legal peril, and may think that declaring his run this early will be useful to his parallel propaganda campaign to paint the investigations as politically motivated. Your mileage may vary on how much the Trump campaign coordinated with the effort, but   a Putin appendage just declared , loud and proud, that the Russians meddled in 2016 and will continue to do so whenever they like. Just another thing you can't take the big guy's word on. Fresh off his blundering sabotage of Republicans' midterm efforts, the guy who won't go away is back again.

The landscape is remarkably different from 2016, and not just in the ways Trump purposefully re-made it. Back then, he was engaged in a huge number of shady ventures that he basically could have gotten away with in perpetuity had he not run for office. Now, his eponymous Foundation and University have been shuttered due to extremely above-board business practices and it's his Organization's turn in the barrel. Back then, no one—least of all the media—understood the appeal of   his vicious shamelessness   and what it would do to the garden-variety Republicans caged on stage with him. Now, he's likely to be joined there by some rotating cast of Mini-me's, repellently ambitious new acts with spins on the original play. The most prominent is Gov. Ronald DeSantis of Florida, though that matchup would provide a gruesomely fascinating investigation of how much of Trump's appeal is rooted in his undeniable ability as a TV showman. Could Trump's sternest test come from someone who emerges, as he did, fully formed from the television? DeSantis doesn't have that same reality magic, but maybe people really do want someone   who calls themselves a "fighter anointed by God ."

Trump has held a similar distinction in the Evangelical community for years, with pastors engaging in   ritualized prayer "for" him   in the Oval Office and elsewhere. No one has ever been able to identify which of Jesus Christ's principles Trump embodies, but no matter. No one really cares, it seems, not about his almost militant heathenism and not about his effort to stay in power in contravention of the expressed will of the American people. He will compete for the nomination. The questions are around whether his old magic is still there, if he spends too much of his time venting his personal grievances rather than those of the flock, and whether people really want to live through another half-decade dominated by a personified black hole of attention and noise, someone dedicated to making every second of every day about himself.
 
 
 
JohnRussell
Professor Principal
3.1  seeder  JohnRussell  replied to  JohnRussell @3    3 years ago

 
 
 
squiggy
Junior Silent
4  squiggy    3 years ago

... and it all started with pink pussyhats of the Notmypresident club.

 
 
 
Tessylo
Professor Expert
4.1  Tessylo  replied to  squiggy @4    3 years ago

Still using that old nonsense?  When's the last time you saw a pink pussy hat?

 
 
 
Jeremy Retired in NC
Professor Expert
5  Jeremy Retired in NC    3 years ago
Trump Is Alone With His Big Lie 

He's not "alone".  Remember there are 150 Democrats who have used the same "lie" but for some reason we aren't supposed to bring them up.

 
 

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