The Next Big Lie
We are already moving on to the Next Big Lie courtesy of Donald J. Trump. If the ex-president and his supporters in Congress are to be believed—and they never should be—the current prosecutions are all politically-driven efforts to punish an innocent man. This includes the current indictments in New York and Florida, and likely ones in D.C. and Georgia. In Trumpland, they are all part of a larger conspiracy, led by President Joe Biden in the White House, to jail his top political opponent.
Like the first Big Lie, this next one is a very dangerous and destabilizing narrative, not only because of its potential to foment violence, but because, as with the false claims about the stolen election, it strikes at the heart of how our democracy functions under the rule of law. Should a sufficient number of citizens falsely conclude that Trump is an innocent man who is being unjustly targeted, all because he is a threat to Biden’s hold on power, then we will have moved even farther from the necessary, common ground rules for a stable and functioning democracy.
It’s now clear that Trump and his supporters are willing to take it this far and put our whole system at risk in order to save his hide.
In rebutting any false narrative, the facts are important, and they are these: Trump was indicted not by Joe Biden, or even Attorney General Merrick Garland. In both New York and Florida, Trump was indicted by a grand jury of his peers after presentation of the evidence by prosecutors, none of whom is under the control of the White House. Alvin Bragg is the Manhattan D.A. operating under New York state law, and Jack Smith is the Special Counsel, shielded by law from interference precisely in order to answer and diminish claims of political bias or motivation.
But we cannot stop there, at the legal water’s edge. The Next Big Lie about a politically-motivated prosecution of Trump is being coordinated from the top, while concocted and amplified as a conspiracy from the depths, just as we saw before with the lie about the stolen election. It falls to us, and it is now our responsibility as participants in the discourse to follow, to call the lie out, loudly and early.
Fanning the flames
Predictably, and as we saw with the Big Lie about a stolen election, the man who benefits most from the lie is leading the charge. Trump has been attacking the prosecutions and the prosecutors non-stop: Witch-hunt! Election interference! Weaponization of the FBI!
And once again, as we saw with the Big Lie, Trump’s supporters in Congress dutifully repeat and amplify the false claim that the prosecutions are all politically motivated. Sen. Josh Hawley, for example, tweeted last week, “If the people in power can jail their political opponents at will, we don’t have a republic.” And Ted Cruz put out a full, cynically dishonest statement on his podcast in support of Trump:
Today is a very sad day in American history. We have never in over two centuries of our nation’s history had a new president who launched the entire Department of Justice, the entire machinery of justice on a vendetta to persecute, to attack, to investigate, to indict, to try to throw in jail the former president who, it should be noted, is also currently the leading contender on the Republican side to run against the current president.
Fox is out there doing its part. This week it ran a chyron during a speech by Biden stating, “Wannabe Dictator Speaks at the White House After Having His Political Rival Arrested.” Perhaps realizing that it could face further legal woes and monetary damages for promoting even more false conspiracies, Fox took the chyron down and fired the producer who had run it. But the damage was already done, and the steady drumbeat is proving highly effective: In a recent Reuters/Ipsos poll, some 80 percent of Republicans, and around half of all Americans, now believe that the prosecutions of Donald Trump are politically motivated.
Familiar conspiracy energy
Whether it’s a lie about a stolen election or one about President Biden driving the prosecution, the false narrative feeds upon the power of conspiracy. Such a conspiracy usually takes hold for a few reasons. For starters, many simply want to believe that this is a plot driven by “globalists” and the White House, and not that their guy is in fact a cheat, a criminal and a seditionist.
But more importantly, like any conspiracy, this one is hard to disprove. How do we know Biden isn’t somewhere pulling the strings? How do we know the FBI didn’t plant the evidence? How do we know Jack Smith isn’t some deranged puppet of Barack Obama? They want us to try and disprove a negative, and we shouldn’t take the bait.
Instead we should understand and educate about how such deceptions work. The Big Lie about a stolen election took ordinary, innocent things and spun them into dangerous and untrue accusations. The normal storage of ballots by election workers falsely became “suitcases” full of fake ones. Late-tabulated batches from heavily African American counties became “vote dumps” that put Biden mysteriously ahead in Wisconsin. Human error by a single clerk in Antrim County, Michigan, blew up into nationwide, false accusations that Dominion Voting Systems had thrown the entire election for Biden. None of this was election fraud, and all of it was quickly debunked. But together, they sowed doubt and confusion, enough to propel the conspiracy forward.
The Next Big Lie casts Trump as an innocent victim of a Deep State conspiracy, and it tracks a similar conspiratorial narrative, relying upon disconnected facts to weave a web of misdirection and innuendo. Alvin Bragg received campaign funds from “globalist” George Soros. Jack Smith’s wife was a producer on Michelle Obama’s documentary Becoming. Joe Biden once claimed that, as to Trump, he’s “making sure he, under legitimate efforts of our Constitution, does not become our next president.” That last one set Trump’s hair on fire, and it quickly got twisted from a statement about electorally defeating Trump into a nefarious plot to jail him.
A no-lose argument
On top of relying on disconnected quasi-facts, the claim of political persecution also seeks to avoid answering the heart of the question at hand: Did Trump in fact commit the alleged crimes? This is where GOP misdirection really starts to unravel, at least if we insist on pulling at those strings. Journalists ought to be calling the ultimate question during interviews with Trump’s supporters: If the former president in fact committed crimes, shouldn’t he be held accountable for them?
If the answer is “no” so long as Joe Biden is in the White House, then they need to point out how this is a no-lose argument for Trump. In such a Bizarro world, Trump can crime all he wants, and never go to jail for it, because any effort to charge him is by definition too “political.”
But that can’t be the answer. If Trump decided to shoot someone on Fifth Avenue, as he once famously said, he indeed might not lose any of his followers, but he still ought to go to prison for it. On this most Americans would agree. That’s because if you commit a murder, no matter who you are, you should be punished. And the people who bring you to justice are whom you might expect: prosecutors, grand juries, trial juries and judges.
Willful violations of the Espionage Act are down the ladder from murder, but not by much. When you’ve deliberately used your position and access to put our whole nation at risk, compromising and endangering the lives of our military personnel and members of our intelligence services, you go to prison for that, too, no matter who you are. And the people who should see that process through are the same as in the above example: prosecutors, grand juries, trial juries and judges.
The GOP sure once firmly believed that people alleged to have illegally handled state secrets ought to go to jail for it. Back then, it was about Hillary Clinton while she was Secretary of State. Throughout 2016 Republicans chanted “Lock her up!”— even though Clinton, just like Joe Biden and Mike Pence but very unlike Donald Trump, did not deliberately hold on to and refuse to return any government documents, let alone top secret, national defense information. It was Trump’s own Justice Department that declined to seek further action against her because—and hear me out here—there wasn’t evidence she committed any crimes. What a concept.
The same cannot be said for Trump, and the GOP knows it. What we are seeing, and need the rest of the country to see, is not some political vendetta, of the very kind Trump himself has sworn to pursue if reelected. It is the system working precisely as it is supposed to. In the face of evidence of such crimes, it would actually be a death-knell to trust in our system to give Trump a free pass for his crimes. And yet this is the logical end of the argument of those who stand by him.
Pushing back
As I wrote about earlier, there are growing voices within the GOP who have seen the ketchup on the wall and have refused to jump to the ex-president’s side. Traditional conservative and highly respected jurist Judge J. Michael Luttig of the Fourth Circuit recently put it perfectly:
There is not an Attorney General of either party who would not have brought today’s charges against the former president.
He has dared, taunted, provoked, and goaded DOJ to prosecute him from the moment it was learned that he had taken these national security documents.
On any given day for the past 18 months — doubtless up to and including the day before the indictment was returned — the former president could have avoided and prevented this prosecution. He would never have been indicted for taking these documents.
But for whatever reason, he decided that he would rather be indicted and prosecuted.
After a year and a half, he finally succeeded in forcing Jack Smith’s appropriately reluctant hand, having left the Department no choice but to bring these charges lest the former president make a mockery of the Constitution and the Rule of Law.
As we have had to do over the past two years with the Big Lie about a stolen election, we are summoned to do with the Next Big Lie about a politically-driven prosecution of Trump. We must make this the view of a decisive minority of Americans. That will take time, persistence and education. That process begins by identifying the false and dangerous narrative, by showing how it spreads, and by allying with and uplifting voices within the GOP still willing to uphold the rule of law.
Wow. This is so on point, but it should be spread to a wider audience than this community, where I am afraid you are preaching to the committed. I don't have the marketing savvy to tell you how to do that, Jay, but it needs to be sung from every mountain-top in this country. YOU should be on the same panels as Joyce Vance, Andrew Weissman, et alia, saying this loudly and clearly. Your voice is so clear and decisive. This country needs the slap on the cheek you can deliver with your essays.
To paraphrase P.T. Barnum, there must have been lot of suckers born in the past few years-worth of minutes for that man to be able to drag the national security of this country through the swamp he said he would drain back in 2015/16. The hangers-on in the Congress who colluded with him are scared, their pants are dirty, and that is why we are seeing this all-out assault.
Somehow get this piece out there to a broader public ear.
Once someone has their mind made up, particularly if they decided quickly, it is oh so difficult to change their mind. Plenty of cognitive biases confirm that this is common. Logic is hard work, emotions come easy. One of the things people do to protect themselves (their egos) from being wrong is to simply fall back on a cognitive bias. People can see photos of all the evidence of treason, “but that can’t be my candidate,” their mind screams. If you grew up in an abusive or neglectful way, this goes into overdrive. Unfortunate how we do not teach about common human flaws (but that idea would only inflame the big deep state idea). So, the rethuglicans keep feeding this beast (as Cruz just did). And then safely surround themselves with people like them so that they don’t have to be challenged (or suffer the emotional quake that weak people do) on their absurd thoughts. It seems the best approach is what they have been doing: methodically gathering evidence, unemotional approaches, following up leads, and so on. Ah, if only society (and the media) would starve TFG of attention, I think he would melt like the Wicked Witch of the West.