The Genesis & Context Of Trump's Big Lie
I guess because I’ve been around them since I was a young kid, I’ve always assumed politicians lie. Recently a decades old friend told me that it took her into her 70s before she realized that politicians lie! And she’s smart and a psychologist! So that might be the solution to the question everyone wants to know— how did Trump get 74,223,975 people to vote for him in 2020. He doesn’t open his mouth without lying. But 74 million people must believe all that garbage or some of it.
On Thursday, Adam Liptak, a NY Times legal expert, put forth a theory about how conservatives hope to disqualify Señor T for his role in the J-6 insurrection/attemped coup. He wrote that a couple of prominent Federal Society law professors and constitutional scholars, William Baude and Michael Paulsen have concluded that “Trump is ineligible to be president under a provision of the Constitution that bars people who have engaged in an insurrection from holding government office. The professors are active members of the Federalist Society, the conservative legal group, and proponents of originalism, the method of interpretation that seeks to determine the Constitution’s original meaning.”
Their findings will be published in a long article next year in The University of Pennsylvania Law Review. Baude’s summary: “Trump cannot be president— cannot run for president, cannot become president, cannot hold office— unless two-thirds of Congress decides to grant him amnesty for his conduct on Jan. 6.” Paulsen aded that “There are many ways that this could become a lawsuit presenting a vital constitutional issue that potentially the Supreme Court would want to hear and decide.”
There is, the article said, “abundant evidence” that Trump engaged in an insurrection, including by setting out to overturn the result of the 2020 presidential election, trying to alter vote counts by fraud and intimidation, encouraging bogus slates of competing electors, pressuring the vice president to violate the Constitution, calling for the march on the Capitol and remaining silent for hours during the attack itself.
“It is unquestionably fair to say that Trump ‘engaged in’ the Jan. 6 insurrection through both his actions and his inaction,” the article said.
I wouldn’t get my hopes up that this is going to go further than parlor game for law professors and their students. And besides, I was more interested by a former GOP staffer’s admission about how the Republican Party depends on intentional lies to make its case. The GOP uses right-wing media to knowingly spread lies, according to Justin Higgins, a former policy adviser for Rep Tim Huelskamp (R-KS), a Tea Party extremist. After Huelskamp was finally driven out of office, Higgins got a job as a senior research analyst for the RNC where he worked on creating content for Trump’s 2016 campaign. “That experience,” reported Nick Mordowanec, “didn't last long and nearly immediately led to Higgins changing his political affiliation from Republican to Democrat.”
Higgins told progressive podcaster Aaron Rupar on Thursday that the conservative movement is predicated on selling lies to the American public for their own potential political gain.
…"You can basically make up your own reality in right-wing media," Higgins told Rupar.
…He said former congressional members like Huelskamp and other Tea Party members, including current House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan and others, were elected "because they were mini-Trumps" at a time when a bigger focus on cultural wars and relitigating reproductive rights at the federal level began to escalate.
Higgins said the movement became so strong so fast that former House Speakers John Boehner and Paul Ryan couldn't push back on ideas "on steroids." Now, he said the party’s loudest voices include Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene.
"These people went from the fringe to the mainstream," he added, saying a revamped conservative media landscape that now includes Newsmax, the Daily Wire and others "have given House Freedom Caucus candidates a new life."
Higgins also pushed back on the notion that Democrats and the liberal left engage in their own echo chambers.
"Critics would say that the liberal echo chamber is CNN, MSNBC and mainstream media," he said. "I would say in response to that, that quite frankly it's bullshit. At the RNC all we had to do was repeat talking points and it would go on Fox News as is. Democrats don't do that, the DNC doesn't do it."
He added: "Also, I think an important thing about what differentiates the left and right and the media— the left has no similar echo chamber as evidenced by the lack of a left-wing freedom caucus."
And of course Trump called his pretend-Twitter social media platform "Truth Social." That is quintessential Donald Trump.