Believe the Lies or You're Deranged
Newly elected House Rep. George Santos is just the latest manifestation of a political culture of pathological lying that went mainstream with Kellyanne Conway's "alternative facts"
At the conclusion of the 2016 election, there was a brief glimmer of hope that candidate Trump would abandon his contentious saber-rattling with reality and become presidential, leaving behind his penchant for pathological lying. That hope was soon quashed.
This new age of never-ending lies came in full focus with Kellyanne Conway's invention of "alternative facts". As counselor to President Trump, she proved at the outset of the administration that reality TV tactics and complete falsehoods were now a baked-in feature of the Republican mindset.
On January 22, 2017, Conway attempted to deflect the reality of President Trump's poorly attended inauguration. Press Secretary Sean Spicer had already lied about it. But now, adding another layer of horse manure, on Meet the Press Conway referred to Spicer's lies as "alternative facts". NBC Host Chuck Todd, who apparently can do math, corrected Conway by referring to her mislabeling as "falsehoods".
Fast forward six years. On January 13, 2023, Conway brought her fun house mirror and vengeful yarns to the New York Times, arguing in an op-ed that the managers of Trump's $1.6 billion re-election campaign in 2020 "proved the adage that the fastest way to make a small fortune is to have a very large one and waste most of it."
In her mind, as campaign manager of Trump's victorious 2016 campaign, the 2020 loss to Joe Biden "should have been a blowout" in favor of Trump. What was the winning message they missed? Conway doesn't say. She acknowledges that in 2020 Trump was no longer the shiny new upstart she campaigned for. But wasn't the real waste how Trump's toxic personality and reality TV-style victimhood obliterated the potential for political support outside his cult of personality?
Since the launch of "alternative facts," the faces of the Republican party have become increasingly deranged, resulting in the elections of Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, Lauren Boebert of Colorado, and now the ridiculously pathological George Santos of New York.
In her New York Times op-ed, Conway tries to establish herself as a cool assessor of the pros and cons of Trump's 2024 run at the White House. But in addition to Trump, I hope America has also moved on from coining phrases in an effort to twist sad, inconvenient facts into new, disorienting forms.
Not surprisingly, Conway aims her most withering criticisms at Trump's detractors. Unable to wait, Conway launches into a diatribe over people with "Trump Derangement Syndrome" in the second paragraph of her essay. Note that this made-up malady isn't even an "alternative fact"—it's made up out of thin air. Then she follows up with this cutesy bit: "There is no vaccine and no booster for it". Yes, we are in Kellyanne's alternative reality now. Just like the easily disprovable election fraud in 2020, Conway still lives in the land of this imaginary affliction.
Conway's style of attack is so common by now, it's time to coin a term for it: Trump messianic syndrome, or Trump gullibility complex, or maybe PTSD: Post-Trump sycophantic disease. I won't capitalize these because I'm not a licensed psychologist, but if everyone keeps repeating the same talking points like Trump-worshipping Republicans do, eventually it can earn a proper noun in upper case, like "The Swamp" and the "Deep State".
You know the drill. In Conway's reality TV show, Trump's detractors are stuck inside their "social media bubbles and comforted within self-selected communities suffering from sameness". Yikes, that sounds so boring and awful. But, it's safer than finding yourself inside a violent paramilitary mob that believes the outgoing president's delusional lies that are being repeated in a right-wing social media bubble. Those who believed Trump and are on trial for attacking our Capitol are now finding out that America's savior of greatness won't be helping them with their legal fees, and will be suffering along with a self-selected community of sameness in the comfort of a prison cell. Meanwhile, Trump continues to beg for money daily—so he can save America for real the second time around.
Conway writes that "never Trumpers" are disguising their hatred for Trump as a "righteous call for justice or a solemn love of democracy and country." By this same logic, Trump's supporters who stormed the Capitol were using love of country to disguise their gullibility for lies, wrapped their hair-brained conspiracies in the American flag, turned sore losers into heroes, and recast their political violence as love of democracy. Talk about "alternative facts". It's all the delusions of populist propaganda.
Conway points out that of the 74 million Trump-Pence voters in 2020, most of them were not in the Capitol on that awful day. So what? How about noting that all of the people who were there on that awful day (including the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers) were there to attend the Stop the Steal rally because the outgoing president wouldn't stop lying about election fraud claims that had been proven worthless in more than 60 court cases. Because of the right-wing social media bubble, a majority of Republican voters to this day still think the election was fraudulent.
Republicans just keep handing out a big pill of psychological nonsense that's impossible to swallow. Since the launch of "alternative facts," the faces of the Republican party have become increasingly deranged, resulting in the elections of Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, Lauren Boebert of Colorado, and now the ridiculously pathological George Santos of New York.
Kevin McCarthy's tortuous election to Speaker of the House just shows that the Republican party isn't serious about getting a grip on its emboldened right-wing looney bin. Santos is cut from the same pathologically lying cloth as Trump. The GOP can whine all it wants about how people can't stand Trump. But calling them hateful and deranged, all while sending delusional crackpots to Congress, undercuts the argument.
Conway can complain all she wants about the usual grievances—social media censorship, Trump getting no credit for anything, "Trump derangement syndrome"—but it's all just reverse psychology, playing the victim while blaming everybody else.
Even though he won, in 2016 Trump received nearly 3 million fewer votes than Hillary Clinton—that's the biggest deficit in the popular vote for a winning President since Rutherford B. Hayes in 1876. Only the Electoral College saved Trump's hide.
So, how will historians remember this delusional stretch of "conservatism" in crisis? It's impossible to know. But one thing is certain. No historian worth a grain of salt publishes "alternative facts". Shame on you, Kellyanne Conway. That's called propaganda.