Ministry of truth Democracy, reality, and the Republicans' war on the recent past

The Republican Party is waging a "frantic gaslighting campaign" to "rewrite the stories that have unfolded over the last several years," according to this illuminating account from Benen (The Impostors), a producer of The Rachel Maddow Show. Pointing to polls showing that "a majority of Republican voters that Trump made no effort to overturn the 2020 election," among other misbeliefs that absolve Donald Trump from wrongdoing and exaggerate his successes as president, Benen delves into how the Republican playbook of "historical revisionism" has evolved in recent years to make such lies possible to perpetuate. While much of it comes down to Trump's habitual lying and self-aggrandizing being repeated as fact on right-leaning outlets like Fox News, Benen also spotlights Republican politicians who have entered Trump's alternate reality and begun generating their own pro-Trump spin, like Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson, who claimed the Jan. 6 insurrectionists were "fake Trump protesters," and New York congresswoman Elise Stefanik, who asserted that the FBI's search for classified documents at Mar-a-Lago was part of a "hoax." While Benen, true to form, spends slightly too much time on Russia-related events, his account is well sourced and covers a lot of ground. This cogent survey of the Trumpist lie factory is worth checking out for more than just fans of Maddow. (Aug.)

A fierce takedown of right-wing mendacity committed in the service of a bigger lie. It's one thing to spin fables about the phone company killing JFK. It's quite another to take an event within recent memory and twist it out of all recognition--to say, for instance, that the Jan. 6, 2021, storming of the Capitol was just everyday tourist visitation or legitimate political protest. As Benen, a producer for the Rachel Maddow Show and the author of The Impostors, writes, any Republican who wants to make such claims has to do so without an ounce of bashfulness or self-doubt, for the public will pick up on the fearful scent and leap. "Republicans who intend to replace a factual series of events with fictitious ones must fully commit to the new narrative," he writes, "no matter how ridiculous it is." Thus Sen. Tommy Tuberville in a nutshell, and thus the rationale for all of the chaotic performance art on the part of a panoply of GOP leaders: Kevin McCarthy, say, who condemned the Jan. 6 attack but then, in the very next breath, declared that Trump had won the election; the refusal of Republicans up and down the ballot to commit to honoring the results of the next election ("election results are to be embraced when GOP candidates prevail"); their insistence that Trump is the victim of a weaponized Justice Department and not a con man brought to justice. The spin continues: In the current cycle, Republicans are focusing on inflation as a talking point, ignoring that the economy has grown and the unemployment rate has fallen during the Biden administration. Unabashedly one-sided, Benen paints with a broad brush, but not without reason. Not likely to win over many from the other camp, but with a good amount of signal among the partisan noise. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.