I've Never Seen So Many Lies in All My Years Covering US Elections
To borrow one of Donald Trump’s favorite phrases: the GOP nominee lies “like nobody’s seen before."
Donald Trump punctuates his carnival barker boasts and smears with superlative variants of “like nobody’s ever seen before.” As usual, he tells on himself.
It turns out the phrase both illustrates and describes the fathomless dishonesty of his attempt to win back the White House.
That Trump presents fiction as fact, flavored by racism, cruelty, and grift, no longer surprises anyone. His lurid slanders against Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, stand out mainly because they have terrorized an entire community.
“The most vicious, despicable, lie-filled campaign I’ve ever seen,” as Republican dissident Sarah Longwell put it on CNN last week. I’ve followed campaigns longer than Sarah and can confirm that no one’s seen anything like it.
But the lies run deeper than individual false assertions or the dystopian visions Trump invents about our vibrant country and its world-leading economy. They infect core GOP messages on subjects from taxes to inflation, from health insurance to debt.
Well before Trump seized control, Republicans had sealed themselves in a worldview that doesn’t fit 21st-century Americans or the modern world. It’s a political cul-de-sac from which deceit offers the only escape.
Republicans champion the grievances and resentments of a shrinking white Christian minority as the nation grows steadily more diverse. They decry economic conditions that their policies would plainly worsen.
Hobbled by unpopular, self-defeating impulses, they struggle to fund government programs their core supporters depend on. They cannot govern and lie about Democratic opponents who can.
Consider some examples: