One of my all-time favorite TV or movie lines comes from Elmore Leonard’s Justified, a long-form television show chock-full of memorable quotes. In one particular episode, US Marshall Raylan Givens explains his basic philosophy: “You run into an asshole in the morning, you ran into an asshole. You run into assholes all day, you’re the asshole.”
I was reminded of this line while watching the latest smear commercial by the Donald Trump campaign. In the ad, the GOP tries to paint Joe Biden as unreliable by showing a film clip from 1987 in which he lied. That in itself is no surprise; that’s what politicians do. They lie, exaggerate, or spin everything to make themselves look better. What makes this ad so amazing is that they had to go back 33 years to find such a clip. I would love to have been a fly on the wall during the meeting with the president in which he devised that brilliant strategy and decided to use the clip. His aides would have been looking uneasily at each other wondering who would speak up. Finally, one of them would mumble, “Umm . . . sir . . . Mr. President . . . according to the latest impartial fact-check count, you have misled, deceived, or outright lied well over 20,000 times—and that’s just in the four years since you have taken office. Last weekend, you told four lies in one tweeted sentence. Do we really want to go there?”
Trump, of course, operates by the philosophy of “Why tell the truth when a lie will do?” and has doubled down every time someone calls him on this multitude of prevarications. He simply points to someone else, says they are the liars, and indicates that they are out to get him. (This is, by the way, the definition of paranoia.) According to him, the “liberal media,” which includes every news source on the planet except the bobble-headed sycophants at Fox, lied. The Democrats lied. The generals and officers such as Colin Powell, James Mattis, and Alexander Vindman lied. The journalists who reported that Trump called military personnel who gave their lives defending this nation “losers” and “suckers” lied (even Fox verified that one). The doctors and scientists who actually care about the number of deaths in the US lied. The women he assaulted lied. Authors who write about him—even close family members—all lied. His own appointees who insisted on doing the right thing, rather than what they are ordered by him to do, lied. The few Republicans with the guts to speak out lied. Our own intelligence agencies, from the FBI to the CIA, lied. You get the picture: He met liars in the morning. He met liars all day long. The poor man is inundated with liars.
What would Raylan would say about that situation? I have a pretty good idea.
So, in Trump’s disturbed mind, or at least in his bombastic political rhetoric, the entire world is part of a massive conspiracy to discredit him with “hoaxes,” “fake news,” or other falsehoods. He constantly assures his followers that he—and he alone—is capable of telling them the truth. To students of history, this must all sound eerily familiar. It’s a technique called “The Big Lie,” and has been used by such luminaries as Benito Mussolini, Joe McCarthy, and the man who perfected it, Adolf Hitler. The “Big Lie” means that the speaker makes up something outrageous, and repeats it so often, and with such conviction, that people stop questioning it, regardless of the ridiculous nature of the statement. Followers become hypnotized by the Big Lie in a cult-like fashion. Hitler, like Trump, harangued his audiences with a barrage of messages designed to generate fear and distrust. He created a fictional conspiracy and convinced the German people that the Jews were responsible for the Great Depression and every other problem they faced. Newspapers, radio stations, and anyone who disagreed with him were labelled liars, and he contended that only he would tell them the truth. Amazingly, this strategy worked, and he slowly eliminated all opposition within the government and news media until he had dismantled a republican form of government and replaced it with a personal dictatorship. You all know the rest of that story.
With an election coming up, a Nazi-like disaster can still be averted. The bigger concern, though, is the long-term damage that Trump’s tsunami of lies has done to democracy and our nation going forward. The recently released tapes of Trump talking to Bob Woodward indicate that he absolutely understood the lethal nature of the Covid virus back in February and March, but consciously chose to lie about it as a political strategy. The fact that about 40% of American voters still support this man despite the relentless lies, the complete destruction of our national reputation, and the staggering failure of his response to the Covid crisis, indicates that the truth and competent leadership are no longer expected from our president. A significant portion of the country just wants to hear comfortable lies that fit their world view. Or, more accurately, most of his followers actually believe the fictional version of the truth that is manufactured by Trump and his Fox allies, regardless of how preposterous the lie and despite all evidence to the contrary. And now, thanks to the Woodward tapes, we know that he purposely creates those lies and falsehoods; they are not slips of the tongue or “jokes” as his spin masters disingenuously try to characterize them. They are intentional, because he knows that those 40% of the people will accept them as the truth. I can’t imagine a more dangerous development than this.
In a different Justified episode, Raylan Givens attacks a criminal while trying to elicit information about the location of a missing and endangered person. While the man is still on the ground, Raylan ejects a bullet from his gun and tosses it on the man’s chest. Then he says, “Next one’s coming faster.”
As a metaphor for our current situation, that guy on the ground is us, the people of the United States, laid out flat by the string of disasters wrought by Donald Trump and his audacious lies. Raylan personifies the warning about what will happen if Trump is re-elected. “Next one’s coming faster.”