Opinion: Donald Trump and the GOP’s epidemic of lies

Opinion: Donald Trump and the GOP’s epidemic of lies

Last week, a Washington, D.C., jury determined that former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani had defamed two former Georgia election workers, ultimately awarding the two women an eye-popping $148 million judgment. Concurrently, conspiracy theorist Alex Jones was wrestling with the fallout from his own $1.5 billion defamation lawsuit, with a last-ditch proposal of just $55 million over 10 years to the families of Sandy Hook.

Earlier in the year, right-wing media titan Fox News faced its first vulnerability in decades after Dominion Voting Systems successfully sued them for election-related lies. And former President Donald Trump earned his own mark of scorn in September after a federal judge found him liable for defaming writer E. Jean Carroll.

It’s an expensive year to be a liar.

The fight to claim even a penny of the court’s judgment from Fox, Giuliani or Jones will be — has been — an exhausting and costly process for the regular Americans they victimized. There are plenty of tricks both men can deploy to delay paying out what’s owed, from declaring bankruptcy to making a last-minute move to Florida, where debtor protections favor men in their position. But these cases also raise the larger question of how and why Republican-aligned leaders became so comfortable doubling down on easily disproved lies.

Giuliani is the perfect example. The guy barely made it outside of the courthouse before he immediately defamed election workers Shaye Moss and Ruby Freeman a second time, in almost identical language. That, unsurprisingly, led Moss and Freeman to sue Giuliani again, for exactly the same offense.

“Everything I said about them is true,” Giuliani said, ignoring the fact that a jury of his peers unanimously declared the opposite. Giuliani clearly knows better; he was once a prominent United States attorney, although his legal career has careened toward disbarment after his election denialism meltdown in 2020. Yet none of the GOP’s prominent lawyers, from Harvard Law graduates Ted Cruz and Ron DeSantis to Yale Law alums like Josh Hawley, have expressed a hint of concern over Giuliani’s behavior. In fact, many of them feed Giuliani’s conspiracy that courts and juries and the justice system itself is hopelessly biased against MAGA Republicans.

Believe it or not, those Republicans are capable of nuanced legal thought, even if that mostly takes place behind closed doors these days. They saw, as we all did, that Giuliani failed to present any of his much-hyped “evidence” at trial, declining to testify in his own defense after claiming the opposite. But even battered and dishonored, Giuliani is still a man with Donald Trump’s phone number in his pocket, so Cruz, Hawley and the rest apparently have no option but to swallow his falsehoods and offer a supportive thumbs up.

Trump certainly has played a role in the GOP’s rapid decline. The former president and 2024 Republican frontrunner’s own capacity for lying is legendary, and his habit of doubling- and tripling-down on disproven tales, sets the standard in Republican politics. It’s no surprise that, given carte blanche to embrace their most cynical selves by a party leader with no moral compass to speak of, some Republicans have discovered that lying is punchier than telling the truth — and the odds of actually being held legally accountable are slim.

But Trump is just a symptom of a problem that truly took root in the GOP during the Obama years, when America’s first Black president sent Republicans into fits of birtherism and conspiracy theorizing. As far as Republicans were concerned, any strategy that stymied Barack Obama was worth it, from hamstringing Supreme Court nominations to remaining loyally silent while prominent Republican leaders told knowing lies about Obama’s faith, birthplace, policies and patriotism.

In the end, Trump played the Obama outrage game better than anyone else while also persuading Republican voters that they didn’t need to feel any shame for perpetuating anti-Obama lies. Fifteen years after Obama’s historic election, the right is now dominated by its loudest conspiracy theorists.

Trump may have destigmatized lying to achieve political ends, but he didn’t decriminalize it. Those lies have now cost Republican-aligned groups over $2 billion in court judgments. Unfortunately, those big punishments haven’t slowed the GOP’s cascade of mistruths, as Giuliani can attest. For now, there is still too much to be gained by aligning with Trump for any serious Republican to consider otherwise. Even Giuliani’s $148 million judgment is rationalized as an acceptable loss when loyalty could mean Giuliani’s ascent to attorney general in a second (dubiously democratic) Trump administration.

With no way back to integrity and their legal bills mounting, the right is increasingly betting everything on a restored President Trump granting them his personal protection from the justice system. Trump has even promised as much, along with a pledge to pardon the Jan. 6 insurrectionists jailed for believing his bogus election denialism.

A second Trump term promises to usher in a post-consequences era for the MAGA faithful. Our country isn’t prepared for what comes next.

Max Burns is a veteran Democratic strategist and founder of Third Degree Strategies.

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