Lying Is Loyalty in Trump’s GOP

Donald Trump, who proved to be deeply dishonest as a candidate in 2016, and as president for four years, is lying with reckless abandon as he tries to return to the White House. Last week, for example, he claimed a fake endorsement from JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon. When pressed on the claim, Trump said, “I don’t know anything about it,” and blamed a member of his staff. But the way in which the rest of the Republican Party has subscribed to the Trump unreality show is rapidly evolving into a kind of mass psychogenic disorder. Unlike in 2016, when he was an outlier, Trump now controls the entire Republican Party. You might even say that Trump—whose daughter-in-law is the co-chair of the RNC and whose son essentially picked his vice-presidential candidate—is the GOP, sort of like the Borgias without the religious affiliation.

Trump, of course, is not the only one who resides in the dis- and misinformation ecosystem of his own making. There is his running mate, JD Vance, who recently suggested that fact-checking is a partisan activity because one side is so profoundly stymied by facts. “The rules were that you guys weren’t going to fact-check,” Vance whined when fact-checked by CBS’s Margaret Brennan during the vice-presidential debate—which was how the right responded when moderators fact-checked Trump during his ABC debate against Kamala Harris. There are senators like Marco Rubio, who recently accused the nonpartisan Bureau of Labor Statistics of being fake news, writing on X: “Another fake jobs report out from Biden-Harris government today.” And then there are business magnates like Elon Musk, who has parroted a number of Trump’s baseless claims and who joined the former president on the campaign trail this weekend.

In a world where everything that doesn’t support the MAGA narrative is considered “fake,” there is no room for inconvenient truths—or even just truths that don’t make the case for MAGA. In fact, simply saying the truth is a sign of disloyalty in Trump’s Republican Party, where reality has been destroyed and rebuilt by Trump’s fictions. The more truth-bending the lies, the more Republicans must buy into it, which has turned lying into a litmus test for the GOP. Take, for instance, House Speaker Mike Johnson, who was recently asked by ABC’s George Stephanopoulos: “Can you say unequivocally that Joe Biden won the 2020 election and Trump lost?” It’s a yes-or-no question, but Johnson refused to answer in kind, saying that it’s somehow “a gotcha game.”

This past week, the depths of MAGA mendacity reached a new low when Trump used Hurricane Helene—which devastated parts of Georgia, the Carolinas, and beyond, leading to over 230 deaths—to promote another smear against his opponents: On Monday, he said of Georgia’s governor Brian Kemp, “He’s been calling [Biden]” and “hasn’t been able to get him,” as if Biden has been twiddling his thumbs amid the disaster. This was apparently a bridge too far even for Kemp, a pro-Trump Republican, who eventually debunked Trump’s claim: “[Biden] just said, ‘Hey, what do you need?’ And I told him, you know, ‘We got what we need. We’ll work through the federal process,’” Kemp said, correcting the record. “He offered that if there’s other things we need, just to call him directly, which—I appreciate that.”

Nevertheless, Trump and his allies, including Musk, spent the rest of the week spreading falsehoods about the hurricane response. Few baseless claims were more disturbing than the one that Trump spewed about immigrants and Harris: “Kamala spent all her FEMA money, billions of dollars, on housing for illegal migrants, many of whom should not be in our country,” he said Thursday in Michigan, suggesting that Harris diverted disaster relief for political reasons. “They stole the FEMA money, just like they stole it from a bank, so they could give it to their illegal immigrants that they want to have vote for them this season.” It was a “bald-faced” lie, as the White House declared, but it’s one that Trump continued to repeat at least twice this past Friday, despite it already having been roundly debunked.

The big irony here is that it is not Harris but Trump who is guilty of doing this. According to The Washington Post, “In 2019, the Trump administration, in the middle of hurricane season, told Congress that it was taking $271 million from DHS programs, including $155 million from the disaster fund, to pay for immigration detention space and temporary hearing locations for asylum seekers who had been forced to wait in Mexico.” Indeed, Trump, as I pointed out earlier this cycle, has repeatedly accused Democrats of doing things he actually did (see: his claim that Harris heading to the top of the ticket was a “coup”).

Again, Trump lying is nothing new. But the sheer volume of his falsehoods—and the way they’re systematically endorsed by leading members of the Republican Party—has tipped the base into the unreality that the Democratic political establishment is utterly nefarious and partisan. But the actual reality is more boring: The federal government is staffed largely by nonpartisan career civil servants, and it is, rather, Project 2025 that would reshape it into something nefarious and partisan. As another hurricane heads toward Florida, one has to wonder how deadly the consequences of the GOP’s unreality will be in the coming days—not to mention in the next four years if Trump’s government is tasked with relieving the disasters to come.