“Over the last month, you can feel that something important has happened. A tipping point has been reached. Republicans who used to act like they had not heard or read the latest Trump outrage now show up at his trials and parrot his most vile lies. The GOP now openly extol the virtues of political prosecutions and disparage the rule of law.” -- Marc Elias (as quoted in the New Republic)
Recently two conservatives, Jonah Goldberg and George Conway, have characterized Republicans' lying as an addiction. From The Hill, June 13:
“It’s the logic of an addict. And they’re feeding an addiction,” Goldberg said, “And they’re feeding an addiction — which is, eventually, you get used to the dosage, you have to up the dose.”
“The outrage machine that Trump raises money off of and uses as an ATM constantly needs the rhetoric to go to 11, 11.1, 11 — just keep going higher because otherwise people become inured to it,” he added.
Conway had used the same phrase earlier, when he called out Scott Jennings in a heated give and take on CNN. From The Wrap, May 31:
“I mean, look, Scott’s lying,” he said, exasperated. “And that’s the problem with the Republican Party. It is continually addicted to lies.”
Republican lawmakers, candidates, operatives, media stars -- all the MAGA folks with public platforms defending Trump -- are willing to lie. And it's natural for the Republican rank and file to accept what they hear from their leaders. But -- even if we ascribe special fault to party leaders for moving the GOP in an authoritarian direction (as Levitsky and Ziblatt do) -- does that relieve the Republican base of responsibility for accepting the lies?
Watching the recent evolution of the Republican Party, as it has become a wellspring of increasingly outrageous lies, lies that are "obviously untrue and obviously destructive," Peter Wehner has come to see devotion to Trump, and the willingness to accept whatever he says, as a reflection of a person's character. Writing yesterday in the Atlantic, he suggests that folks all-in with Trump's lies, which have grown more extravagant and damaging, are "willfully blinding" themselves: "choosing not to know."
Throughout my career I’ve tried to resist the temptation to make unwarranted judgments about the character of people based on their political views. For one thing, it’s quite possible my views on politics are misguided or distorted, so I exercise a degree of humility in assessing the views of others. For another, I know full well that politics forms only a part of our lives, and not the most important part. People can be personally upstanding and still be wrong on politics.
But something has changed for me in the Trump era. I struggle more than I once did to wall off a person’s character from their politics when their politics is binding them to an unusually—and I would say undeniably—destructive person. The lies that MAGA world parrots are so manifestly untrue, and the Trump ethic is so manifestly cruel, that they are difficult to set aside.
If a person insists, despite the overwhelming evidence, that Trump was the target of an assassination plot hatched by Biden and carried out by the FBI, this is more than an intellectual failure; it is a moral failure, and a serious one at that. It’s only reasonable to conclude that such Trump supporters have not made a good-faith effort to understand what is really and truly happening. They are choosing to live within the lie, to invoke the words of the former Czech dissident and playwright Vaclav Havel.
Those of us outside the MAGA world should be pragmatic if we wish to preserve our democracy. Most Americans are not cultists and are not willfully blind. They are people of good faith who care about our country, whether or not they think much about politics or democracy. And these are the folks we need to engage between now and November 4, when we will all be making a choice for the country we wish to live in.