Donald Trump is the perfect Republican. A party built on lies has found a liar to lead them

LUCIAN K. TRUSCOTT IV
JANUARY 19, 2019 1:00PM (UTC)

It’s hard to put your finger on the foundational lie of the modern Republican Party, there are so many contenders. But I would date it back to Ronald Reagan and the lie of supply side economics. Remember that whopper? Even George Bush the First called it “voodoo economics” before he embraced it. The idea that lowering taxes would raise revenue was as close to a perfect Republican lie as there ever was. It simultaneously lined the pockets of the wealthy, “starved the beast” of government (in the immortal words of Grover Norquist), and laid the groundwork to attack the so-called “entitlements” of Social Security and Medicare as the culprits when the deficit inevitably blew up. That the arguments for lowering taxes were spurious if not entirely fact free was just icing on the cake.

The only thing Republicans have learned from Donald Trump is that they no longer have to lie strategically. They don’t need a rationale behind a lie. Trump has taught them that all lies, all the time is the way to go. They didn’t even bother trying to defend the Trump/Ryan tax cuts of 2017 with lies about increased revenues and lowered deficits. They just sat back and threw money at their rich donors and let Trump sign the tax cuts into law, and then of course immediately went after Social Security and Medicare for blowing up the deficit.

They’ve been looking for a professional liar like Donald Trump to lead them for decades. Remember how they turned on George Bush the First when he went back on his pledge of no new taxes? Bush had the gall to actually take stuff like the budget and the deficit into account when he raised taxes half way through his term. That was it for Bush. Enough Republicans stayed home on election day in 1992 that Bill Clinton turned Bush into a one-term president.

The arrival of Slick Willie in White House opened the door for the lie that was the Whitewater investigation. Whitewater begat an early embrace by the Republican Party of far-right conspiracy mongers who floated the story that White House aide Vince Foster had been murdered by the Clintons. Foster committed suicide by shooting himself in the mouth, but that wasn’t good enough for loons like Republican Congressman Dan Burton of Indiana, who shot a watermelon in his own backyard to prove that the FBI didn’t know anything about investigating a murder.

It wasn’t far from Dan Burton’s theories about the Clintons murdering Vince Foster to the lie that Hillary Clinton was running a pedophile sex ring out of a Washington D.C. pizza place. Shades of Whitewater, they managed to spend a couple of years and about $8 million investigating Hillary for Benghazi. It’s not really necessary to go into all the lies they floated because pretty much all they did was yell “Benghazi! Benghazi!” and that was all the evidence they needed that somehow Clinton was responsible for a terrorist attack on a State Department outpost in Libya. Even Trey Gowdy’s own committee’s report had to admit there was nothing to the charges. But that didn’t stop them from using “Benghazi” as a battle cry against Clinton during her 2016 run for president.

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https://www.salon.com/2019/01/19/donald-trump-is-the-perfect-republican/