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The RNC weaponized exhaustion
The sheer volume of lies and illegal behavior from Trump and the Republicans is what allowed them to get away with it.
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Writing honestly about the RNC requires centering the dishonesty. But adequately describing the sheer breadth and brazenness of the lying that was on display these past four days would take volumes. And after a certain point, the whole thing reaches diminishing returns: Some depressing political science research suggests that pointing out when Trump is lying doesnt actually change the way voters feel about him.
And thats the dark brilliance of the RNC, and maybe the entire Trump presidency. If you just lie and break legal rules frequently enough and brazenly enough, the sheer volume of misconduct will overwhelm the systems that are designed to check them.
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Trump gets away with this not despite the severity of the abuses but because of them. When the wrongdoing is so flagrant and so widespread, so routinized in the functioning of government, it becomes impossible to separate the misconduct from the Trump administration itself. What is the Office of the Special Counsel, the federal agency that handles Hatch Act violations, supposed to do kick out the entire White House staff?
This same tactic also works to keep the Republican Party in line. In the past, members of a presidents party might be willing to criticize isolated instances of misconduct by the president or his staff. But with Trump, the dishonesty and criminality are so baked in that the GOP cant realistically go after it without discrediting the entirety of his presidency. So theyre faced with a choice: undermine their own hold on power or go along with the degradation.
Its very clear theyve chosen the second.
One notable thing about Trumps dishonesty last night: almost all of it was in his prepared text, writes Dale, the CNN fact-checker. In general, the vast majority of his lying as president has been ad-libbed. In campaign season, they start putting the lies in the scripts.
https://www.vox.com/2020/8/28/21405144/trump-rnc-speech-fact-check-lies-hatch-act
StClone
(11,684 posts)Kremlin Against Our States! We can defeat that 35 percent who support chaos.
FM123
(10,053 posts)tanyev
(42,572 posts)I never paid any attention to him before he ran for president, but he does have an astonishing capacity to release an endless tsunami of lies and bullshit. By the time the system starts going after him for something, he's already got hundreds or thousands more lies and scams on the table. He and the current Republican Party were made for each other.
Demovictory9
(32,457 posts)"look at what I'm getting away with now... convention at the WH".