"Then Give Them All The Lie"

There are seasons of history when lies move in on a country and come down on the people like weather.

Not one lie, or a few lies, but a whole front of them, settling in, darkening the sky, until it’s as if the only thing that the people can see are lies.

The fascist regimes of the last century covered the skies above with lies like that. So did the totalitarian communist states. North Koreans live under that sky still. And once again, from the mighty stones of the Kremlin, Vladimir Putin is making a determined effort to rebuild the old Soviet empire of lies. Other regimes—Iran, Cuba, Eritrea—use lies not necessarily to persuade everyone, but to brutalize them: to demonstrate that power can force people to repeat what they know to be false.

And then there is our own strange and tragic case: Donald Trump’s relentless, half-successful effort to erect an alternative reality—political, cultural, medical, historical—on a foundation of falsehood.

It’s a challenge for Trump. America is different. We are too open, too argumentative, too unruly a society for truth to be erased altogether. There are too many sources of information, too many independent institutions, too many citizens who insist on looking for themselves.

And yet Donald Trump has succeeded, at least partly, in constructing an alternative political and cultural reality for tens of millions of Americans.

In that reality, Trump won the 2020 election. Vaccines are more dangerous than the diseases they prevent. Anthony Fauci helped create COVID and killed millions. Democrats can win elections only by cheating. The United States has won the war against Iran. The ayatollahs are begging for a deal. The Strait of Hormuz is open. Trump has ended eight wars. He has won California three times, except for the fraudulent votes. The Reflecting Pool was deliberately vandalized by a former Olympian.

Trump’s lies overwhelm the body politic, like a disease. They thrill the faithful—tens of millions of Americans have altered their reality according to Trump’s lies, or have simply gone along with them. It’s intoxicating to shatter reality. Addicting.

But it’s not the thrill of the faithful that worries me. It’s the despair of everyone else.

The brazenness, the scale of the falsehoods, the fact that belief in the lies is forged with furious resentment against anyone who dares to name them—it’s all too much for so many Americans.

The Republic of Lies that Donald Trump is attempting to establish can feel like a kind of crushing weight on decent people who love this country and have begun to wonder whether truth has any purchase left at all.

How can a country function when millions of people refuse to acknowledge basic facts? What can an honest person do against a political movement that treats evidence itself as an enemy?

Not always quickly. Not always triumphantly. Truth does not descend from the heavens in a blaze of transcendent glory and automatically vanquish those who oppose it. If only it were so easy.

History reveals a constant struggle, one where truth loses many battles. Lies can rule countries, fill prisons, and send armies marching. They can survive for generations.

But they cannot repeal reality.

What happened in Washington last week demonstrated that quiet power, in the final instance, that the simple truth still has to shape events…

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