“The rules were that you weren’t going to fact-check…”
That statement made by J. D. Vance in the vice-presidential debate a couple of weeks ago sums up the Trump campaign and the philosophy of the MAGA Republican party.
They want the freedom to make false statements without fact-checking that proves what they are saying is not true.
So Trump has shown no hesitation in exploiting the devastation left by Hurricane Helene in the southeast part of the country by making false statements last week such as:
…President Biden hasn’t answered calls from Georgia’s governor, Brian Kemp…there has been anti-Republican bias in the federal government’s North Carolina response…the Biden-Harris response had received ‘universally’ negative reviews…Kamala Harris spent FEMA money on housing illegal migrants…$1 billion was ‘stolen’ from FEMA for migrants and has gone ‘missing’…the federal government is giving only $750 to people who lost their homes in the hurricane. (Source: Daniel Dale, CNN Fact Checker)
And on Fix News he made his political motivation for making these false statements clear when he said that because of these “failures,” he didn’t see how anyone could vote for Kamala Harris.
This is the state of our politics, and there is one reason and one reason only for it – Donald Trump.
Tragically, we’ve seen this before. The Nazis were the first to exploit the fact that people find it easier to believe big lies rather than small ones because people’s instincts tell them that big lies are too big not to be true.
Donald Trump has adopted the same tactic of exploitation, even to the point of putting people’s lives in danger.
If anyone can explain why even one American is willing to vote for such a man as this, I would love to hear it.
We all know, of course, that it cannot be explained. It is the enigma of all enigmas, the cognitive dissonance of all cognitive dissonance.
So we are left with this conclusion: (1) Donald Trump tells lies; (2) Americans who plan to vote for Trump don’t care. And I might add that refusing to believe the truth is not an excuse.
Historians will likely describe this time in American history as the moment a large segment of its citizens stopped caring whether or not political leaders told the truth.
I wonder…have all of us become numb to Trump’s lying? Both his supporters who aren’t bothered by it and the rest of us who hardly take notice because we’ve heard it so often?
Either way, the most essential value in life – telling the truth, something we teach our children from the time they are old enough to understand what it means – becomes less important in American life.
No decent person believes that is a good thing. No American who cares about the future of the country believes it is a good thing.
And, yet, and, yet, millions of Americans will vote for him as if there is something more important than telling the truth.
If enough of us don’t, we will be able to dismiss Trump and all MAGA Republicans and finally move on without them.
If we don’t win, well, lies will have prevailed, truth will have died, and chaos will reign.
That’s what Trump is offering, and so I ask again, why anyone would vote to have that?
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