The Politico reporter and MSNBC host’s book is an
indictment of the former president but also his Republican party
Lloyd Green
Sun 31 Jul
2022 07.00 BST
Joe Biden
sits in the Oval Office but Donald Trump occupies prime space in America’s
psyche. Mike Pence’s most senior aides have testified before a federal grand
jury. An investigation by prosecutors in Georgia proceeds apace. In a
high-stakes game of chicken, the message from the Department of Justice grows
more ominous. Trump’s actions are reportedly under the microscope at the DoJ.
He teases a re-election bid. Season two of the January 6 committee hearings
beckons.
Into this
cauldron of distrust and loathing leaps Jonathan Lemire, with The Big Lie. He
is Politico’s White House bureau chief and the 5am warm-up to MSNBC’s Morning
Joe. He has done his homework. He lays out facts. His book is a mixture of
narrative and lament.
Lemire
contends that Trump birthed the “big lie” in his 2016 campaign, as an excuse in
the event of defeat by either Senator Ted Cruz in the primary or Hillary
Clinton in the general election. Trump held both opponents in contempt.
In the
primary, Trump lost Iowa – then falsely claimed Cruz stole it.
“Based on
the fraud committed by Senator Ted Cruz during the Iowa Caucus, either a new
election should take place or Cruz results nullified,” Trump tweeted.
In the
general, a half-year later, he dropped another bomb.
“I’m afraid
the election is going to be rigged. I have to be honest.”
In the
final presidential debate he upped the ante, refusing to say he would accept
the electorate’s verdict.
“I will look
at it at the time,” Trump said. “I will keep you in suspense.”
He
definitely warned us. Lemire’s first book is aptly subtitled: “Election Chaos,
Political Opportunism, and the State of American Politics After 2020.”
Then and
now, Trump posited that only fraud could derail him. After he beat Clinton in
the electoral college, he claimed he actually won the popular vote too. In
Trump’s mind, he was the victim of ballots cast by illegal aliens.
“In
addition to winning the electoral college in a landslide, I won the popular
vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally,” Trump tweeted.
To those
within earshot, he said people who didn’t “look like they should be allowed to
vote”, did.
To soothe
his ego, he appointed a commission headed by Kris Kobach, a nativist Kansas
secretary of state, to vindicate his claims. It found nothing.
In a blend
of fiction and wish-fulfillment, Sean Spicer, Trump’s first White House press
secretary, and Kellyanne Conway, a senior adviser, embarked on flights of
fantasy. Spicer declared that Trump’s inaugural crowd was larger than that for
Barack Obama. Conway introduced us to alternative facts.
Lemire’s
indictment goes way beyond that offered by Clinton, who called Trump voters
deplorable. He casts the issue as systemic – and punches up. He is angered but
does not condescend. The Big Lie is also about elite conservative lawyers, Ivy
League-educated senators, Republican House leadership and Mike Lindell, the My Pillow
guy.
Like Gollum
in Tolkien’s Rings trilogy, the House Republican leader, Kevin McCarthy, wants
to get his hands on the speaker’s gavel that badly. Peter Navarro, Trump’s
trade adviser and author of the ill-fated “Green Bay Sweep” plan to overturn the
election, faces charges of criminal contempt. Such acolytes know exactly what
they do.
Extremists
in Congress like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert are vocal totems,
empowered by an enraged ex-president and a vengeance-filled base. In such a world
it seems no surprise cries of “hang Mike Pence”, makeshift gallows and
Confederate battle flags in the halls of the Capitol came to supplant “fuck
your feelings”, the mantra of Trump 2016.
As
expected, Steve Bannon appears in The Big Lie. He loves dishing to the press.
It is in his DNA. The former Trump campaign guru and White House aide, now
convicted of contempt of Congress, trashes his former boss as a reflexive liar.
According
to Lemire, Bannon said: “Trump would say anything, he would lie about anything.”
On cue, a Bannon spokesperson disputed Lemire’s sources, telling the Guardian
they were inaccurate.
In Jeremy
Peters’ book, Insurgency, Bannon mused that Trump would “end up going down in
history as one of the two or three worst presidents ever”. In Michael Wolff’s Fire
and Fury, he described the Trump Tower meeting between Don Jr and a group of
Russians amid the 2016 election campaign as “treasonous” and “unpatriotic”.
And yet
Bannon’s role in Trump’s bid to stay in power remains of central interest to
the January 6 committee. On 5 January 2021, Bannon announced on-air that “all
hell is going to break loose tomorrow”. He spoke to Trump that morning.
Despite his
thoroughness, Lemire does omit the role of one group of Republicans in giving
the big lie added heft. In May 2021, the Washington Post reported on the
efforts of Texas Republicans led by Russell Ramsland, a businessman with a
Harvard MBA.
After the
2018 midterms, Ramsland and colleagues pressed convoluted theories concerning
“voting-machine audit logs – lines of codes and time stamps that document the
machines’ activities”. Pete Sessions, a defeated congressman, didn’t buy what
Ramsland was selling. Trump did.
For Trump’s
minions, this remains a war over lost place and status.
“Republicans
need to prove to the American people that we are the party of … Christian
nationalism,” says Greene, a first-term congresswoman from Georgia.
Like a
toxic weed, the big lie has taken root.
“It is now
part of the Republican party’s core belief,” Lemire writes. Violence and
insurrection have become legitimate. “The Big Lie was who they were.”
Our cold
civil war grows hotter.
The Big
Lie: Election Chaos, Political Opportunism, and the State of American Politics
After 2020 is published in the US by Macmillan
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