The Modern GOP Is Built on Lies
In some ways Trump is more truthful than previous Republican presidents.
After the Senate’s vote to keep Donald Trump from the Oval Office, House Judiciary Committee chair Jerrold Nadler told The New Yorker, “It never occurred to me that an American political party would degrade itself to an authoritarian political party where anything goes, no matter what…. I never thought an American political party could get as bad as now, where they completely don’t care how bad the crimes are.”
Nadler should have been paying more attention. Like him, many liberals, moderates, and of course, never-Trumpers continue to invest themselves in a narrative that posits that a once patriotic party dedicated to conservative principles and the rule of law was just recently corrupted by its fealty to the lies, lawlessness, and racism of its pathological president. Unfortunately, that’s a fiction. Yes, Trump is the most openly dishonest person ever to occupy the White House. But as far as modern Republicans go, he is, in some ways, the most honest. He says and does in public what Republican presidents have been doing in secret for more than half a century.
Many of us are shocked by the brazenness with which Trump and company sought to enlist foreign powers—Russia in 2016, Ukraine this past summer—to undermine our democracy to help with his campaign. But this is basically what Richard Nixon did in 1968. Armed with Henry Kissinger’s secret leaks from the Paris peace talks, Nixon urged South Vietnam, through a surrogate, to refuse any peace offerings negotiated by Lyndon Johnson’s administration because he would give the country a better deal if he was elected president. (He didn’t.) Johnson knew this in real time but, like Barack Obama regarding Trump and the Russians, decided to keep quiet about it. And so Nixon won, and American soldiers and the Vietnamese paid the price.
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