Could Donald Trump’s comfy post-truth ecosystem help derail GOP challengers like Ron DeSantis? The Florida governor is trying to woo the Trump base away with a sleight of hand, refusing to directly challenge the GOP’s standard bearer while making his pitch to the party faithful. “We must reject the culture of losing that has infected our party in recent years,” DeSantis said Saturday in Iowa, without mentioning Trump as central to the party’s struggles in three consecutive cycles. When asked on Monday about that “culture of losing” comment, and if he acknowledges Trump lost, DeSantis pointed out how the GOP lost the House in 2018, lost the Senate in 2020 (as Joe Biden “becomes” president), and underperformed in 2022—all without mentioning Trump.
The problem for DeSantis, who appears on the verge of officially entering the 2024 race, is that in order to make the case he is more electable than Trump this time around, he needs to debunk the lie that Trump actually beat Biden last time. As Republican consultant Alex Conant told Politico, “If a candidate can’t dispose of a fake issue like who won the election, how can voters expect them to handle the real issues?”
It’s not hard to see how the GOP got here. I remember the first time I heard Trump interviewed on television. I was struck by just how truly untethered from the truth he was. Of course, politicians have lied before. But Trump has taken dishonesty far beyond making vague, unfulfillable promises or spinning one’s record. He made tens of thousands of false or misleading claims in office. He’ll say things that can be easily disproved by visible evidence, like that he built his long-promised border wall with Mexico, or that he’d never met E. Jean Carroll, even when there is a photo of him with the columnist who accused him of rape. (A jury last week found Trump liable for sexual abuse and defamation of Carroll.) It was telling that Trump, as president, once told a crowd that what they’re “seeing” and “reading is not what’s happening.”
Trump’s supporters, by ignoring the “fake news” and simply taking his word—or that of his propagandists—are left in post-truth reality. I wrote in November on the “post-truth midterms”—and now we’re entering the post-truth primary. It’s a space where uttering truths that run counter to Trump’s lies becomes an act of betrayal, leaving DeSantis or Mike Pence or anyone hoping to woo this base in a sticky wicket. Even Trump seems to acknowledge how essential the subject of 2020 “fraud” is in the 2024 primary, telling The Messenger this week how if he didn’t talk about it, “I would actually be rebuked by a large portion of the Republican Party.”
The former president’s dishonesty is nothing new, but last week’s off-the-rails CNN town hall brought this trait back to the forefront of American voters’ minds. Trump lied, as he always does about various topics, from the 2020 election (“If you look at True the Vote, they found millions of votes on camera, on government cameras, where they were stuffing ballot boxes”) to blaming the January 6 insurrection on the then Democratic speaker of the house (“crazy Nancy Pelosi and the mayor of Washington were in charge, as you know, of security, and they did not do their job.”)
As often happens during a rally, the town hall audience—which CNN said was made up of New Hampshire Republicans and undeclared voters—rewarded Trump’s lies and insults with applause and laughter. This is the base DeSantis needs to win and this base occupies the post-truth ecosystem that Trump has created and thrived in. In order to draw these supporters back to Earth One, DeSantis would have to challenge the fundamental tenet of Trumpism, which is that Trump’s untruths trump all actual truths. One might be able to puncture a lie, but Trump supporters aren’t going to love you for it. If anything they’ll be enraged.
Republican politicians have rarely gone on offense against Trump, but sure know how to play defense. South Carolina senator and Trump sycophant Lindsey Graham responded to the Carroll ruling by condemning the courts, tweeting, “When it comes to Donald Trump, the New York legal system is off the rails.” Even Florida senator Marco Rubio, who did challenge Trump in the 2016 primary, told reporters “that jury’s a joke.” (During the taped deposition, Trump bragged that he could grab women by the pussy, “Well, that’s what—if you look over the last million years, I guess that’s been largely true. Not always, but largely true. Unfortunately or fortunately.” So the jury, for believing Trump did something he boasted he could do, is the problem?)
Some Republicans do pierce the veil of Trump’s unreality. Senator Mitt Romney said of Trump after the town hall, “You see what you’re going to get, which is a presidency untethered to the truth and untethered to the constitutional order.” But Republican politicians who do that are hardly rewarded; just ask Liz Cheney or Adam Kinzinger. Trump’s untruths act as a barrier, a protective wall around him. So perhaps when Trump says that he’s built the wall, this is what he means. The problem for Republicans is this Trump-built wall keeps out candidates who could win in the purple states.