The Inside Joke That Became Trump's Big Lie

[Nevilledog]

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Laurence Tribe
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“The big lie is that the election was stolen; the big joke is that you can prolong that lie without consequence. The former is a quest for undeserved power; the latter is an evasion of well-deserved responsibility.”

nytimes.com
Opinion | The Inside Joke That Became Trump’s Big Lie
The lie that Trump won the 2020 election has grown so powerful because it is yoked to an older deception: the idea that American politics is a joke.
6:35 PM · Sep 25, 2022

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/22/opinion/trump-big-lie-big-joke.html

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https://archive.ph/MyTGc

Donald Trump’s so-called big lie is not big because of its brazen dishonesty or its widespread influence or its unyielding grip over the Republican Party. It is not even big because of its ambition — to delegitimize a presidency, disenfranchise millions of voters, clap back against reality. No, the lie that Donald Trump won the 2020 election has grown so powerful because it is yoked to an older deception, without which it could not survive: the idea that American politics is, in essence, a joke, and that it can be treated as such without consequence.

The big lie depends on the big joke. It was enabled by it. It was enhanced by it. It is sustained by it.

When politicians publicly defend positions they privately reject, they are telling the joke. When they give up on the challenge of governing the country for the rush of triggering the enemy, they are telling the joke. When they intone that they must address the very fears they have encouraged or manufactured among their constituents, they are telling the joke. When their off-the-record smirks signal that they don’t really mean what they just said or did, they are telling the joke. As the big lie spirals ever deeper into unreality, with the former president mixing election falsehoods with call-outs to violent, conspiratorial fantasies, the big joke has much to answer for.

Recent books like “Why We Did It: A Travelogue From the Republican Road to Hell” by a former Republican operative and campaign consultant, Tim Miller, and “Thank You for Your Servitude: Donald Trump’s Washington and the Price of Submission” by The Atlantic’s Mark Leibovich place this long-running gag at the center of American politics. The big joke drains language of meaning, divorces action from responsibility and enables all manner of lies. “Getting the joke” means understanding that nothing you say need be true, that nobody expects it to be true — at least nobody in the know. “The truth of this scam, or ‘joke,’ was fully evident inside the club,” Leibovich writes. “We’re all friends here. Everyone knew the secret handshake, spoke the native language, and got the joke.”

Without the big joke, the big lie would not merit its adjective. Its challenge to democracy would be ephemeral, not existential.

*snip*

[Hermit-The-Prog]

1. There must be consequences.

Anyone who took an oath to defend the Constitution and spread the big lie is as guilty of insurrection as the thugs who stormed the capitol.

https://www.citizensforethics.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/D101CV202200473-griffin.pdf

[betsuni]

2. Don't agree with that.

But true that "rigged" wasn't a Republican thing in 2016, they copied it. We all know where it came from.