“There he was, the speaker of the House, on my phone and my TV at the same time, doing the same thing,” wrote Josh Moon in The Alabama reporter. “Lying.”
Speaker Mike Johnson never fails to burnish his evangelical Christian creds. So who knows if he learned how to rapid-fire violate the Ninth Commandment from the Master Liar, who owes his two presidential terms to the Big Lie – the idea that if you lie boldly enough, brazenly enough, and often enough, most people will believe you.
Donald Trump didn’t invent the Big Lie. Adolf Hitler did. It’s in Mein Kampf.
Trump, aided and abetted by Johnson and Vice President JD Vance, has again trotted out the Big Lie, this time to convince the public that the Democrats shut down the federal government so they could give free healthcare to “illegal immigrants.”
“But at the risk of banging my head against that rightwing misinformation wall, let’s try a little truth here, complete with facts and junk,” Moon wrote.
He explained: “The reality is this: Democrats want to roll back some of the limitations implemented by Republicans in their incredibly unpopular ‘Big Beautiful Bill’ passed in July, which dramatically cut Affordable Care Act subsidies overall and placed drastic limits on who is eligible for those subsidies.
“More specifically, Democrats want to continue to allow immigrants who are in the country LEGALLY to qualify for the subsidies and purchase health insurance through the marketplace. For example, the BBB restricted immigrants who have followed our laws through the asylum program from receiving subsidies and obtaining ACA coverage. Those immigrants are not here illegally. They’ve done exactly what we’ve asked them to do – follow the laws and come here through our legal immigration system.
“Democrats also want to stop the cuts to those subsidies overall – cuts that the Kaiser Family Foundation has said would cost some 4 million Americans their health insurance and send prices for insurance soaring more than 114 percent on the marketplace.”
Yet, could it be that the Big Lie over the big shutdown is turning out to be a big bust?
“… The fact remains that voters blame Trump and the GOP for the shutdown, not Democrats,” staffer Emily Singer recently wrote in Daily Kos.
“A Navigator Research survey found that the public is blaming Republicans more for the shutdown now than they did at its start. By a 14-point margin, Americans blame Trump and congressional Republicans more than they blame Democrats – that’s an increase of 10 points from [the previous] ... week.
“The poll also found that 52% of voters believe that Trump and Republicans have the power to end the shutdown, while just 21% say that Democrats do.
“At the end of the day, Republicans are just mad that their spin is failing.”
Moon proposed that the GOP’s Big Lie about the shutdown is “such an absurd and easily disproved statement that it’s hard to believe so many grown adults have bought it. Maybe that’s yet another sign of the effectiveness of that rightwing propaganda machine that has suckered so many. But whatever it is, take a step back for a moment and seriously consider whether you think an entire group of politicians in this country are willing to shut down the government and put Americans out of work to ‘give illegal aliens health care,’” as Johnson and his Republican pals are claiming.
“You know it’s wrong, don’t you? Just saying it out loud, you know without a single other fact that that statement is probably untrue, right?
“That’s because it is.”
Hitler’s Big Lies were also patently false and readily debunkable. But in the end, millions of Germans believed him. They embraced, or went along with, Nazism, which led to the most lethal and destructive war in history and to the Holocaust, history’s most most monstrous crime against humanity.
To be sure, Hitler had an easier path to dictatorship than Trump has. Germany lacked a long tradition of stable, representative democracy. The Weimar Republic was only 14 years old when he toppled it in 1933.
The roots of our democratic republic, however imperfect it still is, are 249 years deep. Thus, some Americans still are convinced that fascism can’t take root in our soil. Others argue that with Trump, fascism is already in flower.
If it turns out most Americans disbelieve the Big Lie about the shutdown — and even if Trump keeps cratering in the polls — it seems a safe bet that the president will continue to lie bigly.
“You dance with who brought you,” is an old idiom that means you stick with what got you where you want to be. Trump isn’t about to forsake his dance partner, The Big Lie. Neither are his sycophants.
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