As the fate of the Republic is arguably coming down to the decisions Republican representatives and, especially, senators make in response to the Democrats’ impeachment inquiry, I’ve been thinking about how the extensive propaganda effort at the heart of the Ukraine story — the effort by Trump and his henchmen to concoct a story that Joe Biden is hopelessly corrupt, and that it was actually Ukraine, not Russia, that interfered in the 2016 election to help the Democrats — is clearly known by these same representatives and senators to be the fiction that it is. They’re by and large not stupid people, and they’ve had access to all the same information that has led the Democrats to impeachment. Rather, Trump and company have been propagating this vast fiction, a fiction that reverses all the know facts we’ve learned over the past three-plus years, in order to persuade the Republican base and confuse other voters.
Yet it turns out that GOP politicians are also its intended audience, but in their case, the goal is not to persuade them of its truth, but of its exquisite workmanship: as a glory of 21st century propaganda, a vision of an authoritarian promised land where, through the miracle of Fox News, Twitter, the Internet, and the unmatched hissy-fits of a quite clearly deranged president, many millions of otherwise ordinary Americans are led to believe that up is down, down is up, and something is only true when the president says it is. Republican senators and representatives are not meant to believe or accept it, but to be persuaded by the degree they think it will persuade the voters they purport to represent. Donald Trump may be corrupting much of the federal government to help tell a through-the-looking-glass story to save his own ass (whether it be from the whupping he fears at the geriatric hands of Joe Biden or whatever kompromat Vladimir Putin holds over him), but he’s also effectively engineering a way forward for the GOP at large — a way for the party to avoid the justified democratic wrath and retribution that are its due for foisting this wanna-be dictator on us all.
What Donald Trump is attempting is merely a savagely mutated version of what the GOP has been playing at for a long time now: that in the face of a nation trending towards the Democratic Party, the GOP is justified in resorting to unconstitutional and anti-democratic means to maintain power. Creating a tale in which Democrats have committed crimes of treason and electoral sabotage is in some ways the logical final step — a way to stigmatize the Democratic Party as outside the bounds of acceptability, and to justify any moves that limit the Democrats’ ability to gain office or wield power if elected. The irony, which hardly needs stating but which I’ll spell out anyway because it’s so absurd you just need to see it in black and white every once in a while, is that the Republicans have enabled a president who himself is the one guilty of a disqualifying treason, and that GOP politicians are increasingly delegitimizing themselves (self-impeaching, if you will) as trustworthy to hold power by their continued defense of a man who is, let us no longer mince words, an authoritarian monster.
At any rate, it seems a cynicism bordering on nihilism that shouldn’t be allowed to slide by unremarked: the degree to which the GOP is willing to defend a president’s deranged conspiracy theories not because they believe in them, but because they admire their utility and the hope they offer for a fully-propagandized future that favors the party willing to rule by lies and ruthless power alone.