One Big Lie, many small lies

The Big Liar

Kevin Drum:

If you've been watching Fox News since last November, you believe that:

Democratic voter fraud was rampant in the 2020 presidential election, which Donald Trump probably won.

The 1/6 insurrection was a false flag operation of some kind that was planned and carried out by liberals, the FBI, and other parts of the Deep State who then tried to blame it on Trump supporters.

There is no reason to get vaccinated against COVID-19.

Our nation's public schools have been taken over by left-wing teachers who tell white kids that they should all be ashamed of being white.

Laura Miller on Slate:

....If Landslide has an argument, it’s that while Trump and a handful of his most demented loyalists—first and foremost, Rudy Giuliani—were fully ready to overturn the election, they were far too isolated in that resolve to accomplish anything beyond spinning their wheels. 

“The nature of the Trump chaos,” Wolff writes, “is that, beyond his immediate desires and pronouncements, there was no ability—or structure, or chain of command, or procedures, or expertise, or actual person to call—to make anything happen.” 

While his staff, and GOP politicians hoping to appease Trump voters, put on a show of supporting the president and seriously entertaining his allegations that millions of votes had been either fraudulently cast or suppressed, “everyone” understood that Joe Biden had won the election and would become the 46th president of the United States. 

The staffers were accustomed to humoring Trump in order to (by their own accounts at least) moderate his heedless uninformed impulses. The politicians were dependent on Trump’s base. 

Neither thought that a pretense of going along with his “stop the steal” campaign until his term ran out would cost them anything—not until Jan. 6....