We Need to be Visually and Viscerally Disgusted with These Fucking Liars

I was watching a bit of today’s hearing while at the gym, and even just reading the captions, it’s clear that there’s a whole lot of lying going on, just as there always is with the Trump Administration. Democrats lucked out in two ways on this one. First, they already had hearings scheduled yesterday and today so they could interrogate the liars. Second, the big lie (no classified info discussed, no sir) were so egregious that Jeffrey Goldberg released more of the chat to show that it was full of classified operational details.

One of the big wins of Republican propaganda in the last 20-30 years was to ramp up the cynicism about politicians. “They’re all liars” is a pretty common refrain heard from normies, but the reality is that bold lying, versus spinning, is pretty much the domain of the Republican Party.

The complete bankruptcy of the fact checking project, one of the many failures of mainstream media, actually worked in tandem with Republican propaganda to advance the Republicans’ aim of devaluing the truth in political discourse. Fact checkers labored mightily to make sure the lying scales were balanced, so they made jesuitical distinctions to “catch” Democrats in as many lies as Republicans. This didn’t do anything to make our discourse more factual, and it served to advance the narrative of all politicians being dishonest. The inability of mainstream media to call the utterance of an intentional falsehood a “lie” is another part of the issue.

When Trump arrived on scene and just lied, and lied, and lied, the media was completely unequipped to deal with his firehose of bullshit, and they reverted to stenography, writing down and reporting whatever nonsense came out of his mouth. The few counterexamples, like Daniel Day Dale at CNN, were notable mainly because they’re so rare.

So, we have an environment where lying is normalized, where media not only can’t call out a lie, but insist on taking Trump’s utterances seriously. A good example is the way they treat Executive Orders as settled law the minute Trump signs one.

I don’t know how, exactly, we can reverse this, but here are some thought on how we can start:

1. Emphasize the consequences of Trump’s lies. He lied about Social Security when he said he wouldn’t touch it — you can’t even get them on the phone now.

2. He lied about cutting prices - groceries, especially eggs, are more expensive than they ever were.

3. He lied about DOGE and Musk - he didn’t tell us that he was going to let an unelected dipshit run through the government. Then DOGE lies about how much they’ve saved (they’ve really cost us $500 billion).

4. Even when he does what he said he’ll do, like closing the Department of Education, he lied to every parent with a child getting help from them, because he promised that that states would take over. They haven’t.

5. Finally, not only did he and everyone else in the administration lie about using insecure messaging, they lied even after they were caught in a lie.

The media isn’t going to help — they’ll actively resist reporting when Democrats call out lies. The Republicans will yell and scream when we do it. It’s going to be hard work. But it’s the only way to get us back in a place where lying is considered a bad thing, not just part of life.