Donald Trumps Election Lies His Superpower in the 2024 GOP Primary

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Will Donald Trump’s comfortable post-truth ecosystem help derail GOP challengers like Ron DeSantis? Florida’s governor is trying to woo Trump’s base with a trick, refusing to directly challenge the GOPs standard bearer while making his pitch honest to the party. We must reject the culture of defeat that has infected our party in recent years, DeSantissaid Saturday in Iowa, without citing Trump as central to the parties’ struggles in three consecutive cycles. When asked Monday about the culture of losing the comment, and whether he recognizes Trump has lost, DeSantis pointed to how the GOP lost the House in 2018, lost the Senate in 2020 (as Joe Biden became president), and didn’t performed well in 2022 all without mentioning Trump.

The problem for DeSantis, who appears on the brink of officially entering the race in 2024, is that in order to make the case that he is more electable than Trump this time around, he needs to dispel the lie that Trump actually beat Biden last time. As Republican consultant Alex Conanttold Politico, If a candidate can’t dispose of a fake issue like who won the election, how can voters expect them to deal with real issues?

It’s not hard to see how the GOP got here. I remember the first time I heard Trump interviewed on television. I was surprised at how untethered he was from reality. Of course, politicians have lied before. But Trump has embraced deception more than making vague, unfulfilling promises or spinning a record. He made thousands of false or fraudulent claims to office. Hell he’ll say things that can easily be proven by visible evidence, like he’s building his long-promised border wall with Mexico, or that he’s never known. Jean Carroll, even though there is a photo of her with the columnist who accused her of rape. (A jury last week found Trump liable for sexual assault and defamation of Carroll.) It says that Trump, as president, once told the crowd that what they were seeing and reading is not what is happening.

Trumps supporters, by ignoring the fake news and simply taking his word or that of his propagandists are left in the post-truth reality. I wrote in November on the post-truth midterm and am now entering the post-truth primary. It’s a space where reciting facts that contradict Trumps lies becomes an act of betrayal, leaving DeSantis or Mike Penceor anyone hoping to woo this base on a sticky wicket. Even Trump seems to recognize how important the topic of 2020 fraud is to the 2024 primary, telling Messenger this week how if he doesn’t talk about it, I’m going to be really pissed off by a large part of the Republican Party.

The dishonesty of former presidents is nothing new, but in recent weeks, a CNN town hall has brought this trait back to the forefront of American voters’ minds. Trump lied, as he always does about various subjects, from the 2020 election (If you look at True the Vote, they found millions of votes on camera, on government cameras, where ballot boxes) until the January 6 insurrection was blamed. Democratic speaker of the house (CrazyNancy Pelosi and the mayor of Washington were in charge, as you know, of security, and they didn’t do their job.)

As is often the case at a rally, the town hall audience that CNN said was made up of New Hampshire Republicans and undeclared voters offered lies and insults to cheers and laughter. This is the base DeSantis needs to win and this base occupies the post-truth ecosystem that Trump has created and nurtured. In order to bring these supporters back to Earth One, DeSantis needs to challenge the core tenet of Trumpism, which is that Trump’s lies trump all actual truth. One can poke holes in a lie, but Trump supporters won’t love you for it. If anything they will be angry.

Republican politicians rarely take offense against Trump, but sure know how to play defense. South Carolina senator and Trump sycophant Lindsey Graham responded to Carroll’s ruling by condemning the courts, tweeting, When it comes to Donald Trump, New York’s legal system is off track. Even Florida senator Marco Rubio, who challenged Trump in the 2016 primary, told reporters that the jurors were a joke. (During the taped deposition, Trump bragged that he could get women by the vagina, Well, if you look back over the last million years, I think it’s more true. Not always, but mostly true. Unfortunately or fortunately. So the jury , because of the belief that Trump did something that he was proud to be able to do, is the problem?)

Some Republicans have penetrated the veil of Trumps unreality. SenatorMitt Romney said about Trump after the town hall, You see what youre going to get, which is a presidency untethered to the truth and untethered to the constitutional order. But Republican politicians who do that are hardly rewarded; just ask Liz Cheney or Adam Kinzinger. Trump’s lies act as a barrier, a protective wall around him. So maybe when Trump says he built the wall, he means it. The problem for Republicans is that this Trump wall is keeping out candidates who can win in purple states.

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