Op-ed pages and public discourse clog with predictions, advice and punditry on how Democrats should run political campaigns for federal office, and with postmortems of past campaigns. I have a simple test to see if they’re worth my time: If they don’t talk about Republicans lying, nothing the analysis has to say is valid.
The list of lies seems endless: The press are “security risks” if they’re not unabashed cheerleaders for Pete Hegseth, the president’s military leader. An AI company is a “supply chain risk” because it doesn’t want its tech used to spy on Americans or to cut humans out of the chain of command. Slain protestors are “domestic terrorists.” Trump believes in free speech. Cares about antisemitism. Is against fraud. Despises corruption.
Admittedly, voters are apparently so cynical about politics in general – following a narrative that politicians are all the same, and all liars – that not much changes when Republicans admit to lying, or even to lying as a tactic. But this matters as Democrats enter a phase of beating Republican candidates and the losers have shown how willing they are to lie, with violence when fraud isn’t enough, about who won.
Possibly the most important moment of the 2024 presidential campaign was then-senator J.D. Vance, now vice president, defending to CNN his spreading of lies about Haitians eating pets in Ohio: “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people,” he said, “then that’s what I’m going to do.”
In a normal place and time, normal people would insist that actual suffering be shown with real examples. That Vance had to “create stories” should have been fatal, a final condemnation of the dumb and the devious who oppose science, facts and data.
Nothing has changed, though. Disinformation is defended as merely effective messaging. The White House uses old video and claims it’s new (Kenya in 2024 stands in for Los Angeles in 2025; Los Angeles from early 2025 stands in for Washington, D.C., in late 2025) or employs digital fakery (making it look as though a protester arrested in Minneapolis was sobbing, instead of stoic). When The Washington Post asked about the lies in October, the government applauded its “banger memes.” When called out on fake image in January, a spokesperson’s response was that “the memes will continue.”
People go on electing a party whose leaders are not just famous for lying but vow to keep doing it – and despite knowing they are being lied to. Scott Adams, the disgraced, racist “Dilbert” cartoonist who died Jan. 13, made that plain in writing about Donald Trump in a 2017 book “Win Bigly: Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don’t Matter.” During Trump’s first run for president, comedian and Trump supporter Theo Von criticized Hillary Clinton as someone who “looks like” a liar while crediting Trump with admitting he lies: “I’ll follow this blatant liar instead of somebody playing lie-and-go-seek.”
Even if voters believe candidates are all criminals at heart, surely they understand there are different kinds of criminals? What’s the value to Von and fellow federal Republican voters in electing bold liars who feel no shame or regret when caught? What is the public good when it’s impossible to hold a politician or political party accountable?
It’s baffling, but much of America has decided it doesn’t want to be told the truth by Republicans – that lies are expected, that lies about outcomes are equivalent to “winning” and the truth sucks.
Yet I have read essay after essay, article after article in the past year in which advisers to the Democrats or “third way” thinkers go on talking about politics without addressing how to handle a party that lies constantly.
Instead, there is still a narrative that Kamala Harris lost to Trump in 2024 because she was too focused on identity issues such as trans rights, despite Harris running a relentlessly centrist campaign that almost wholly ignored identity issues.
“Democrats must face, honestly, where we are and how we are perceived,” wrote Obama campaign adviser David Plouffe in a Jan. 15 essay in The New York Times called “Democrats Will Lose in 2028 Unless They Change Course Now.” The closest he comes to acknowledging Republican lies in an essay calling on Democrats to face things honestly is in a section on artificial intelligence as a campaign threat. Tech must be more transparent “about how they identify deepfakes,” Plouffe says, citing an AI “toxic stew” that includes “misinformation.” Whose deepfakes? What misinformation? These are mainly Republican problems, if a strategy qualifies as a problem.
Plouffe’s insights had echoes of a Times essay in July, “The Seeds of Democratic Revival Have Already Been Sown.” From interviews with a range of Democrats, its authors concluded that Democrats’ “economic message will fall on deaf ears if they cannot reenter the cultural mainstream and stop talking down to ordinary people.” It quoted, of all people, Rahm Emanuel, onetime Obama chief of staff who went on to be mayor of Chicago, saying “If you’re outside the mainstream on culture, the public will never trust you enough to listen to your ideas on economic ‘kitchen table’ issues.”
Once again, nowhere in the piece did the 21 people involved in the research or writing mention Republican lying, from smears about Haitians in Ohio to smears about Somalis in Minnesota. (Sensing a pattern here.) They’ll pretend Antifa is an organization and imagine a cartel to justify black-bagging the president of Venezuela. Lie about what tattoos mean and whether tattoos exist. Lie about which migrants are being deported and why, lie about the justification for shooting people in the face and the qualities of the people they shot.
This is the same class of thinkers who reportedly shut down the Harris-Walz campaign’s message that the Republicans were “weird” in favor of focusing on economics, which got drowned out by fact-free GOP campaigning. The issue is obvious to the masses – becoming more so every day – and ignored by the experts.
The closest these top-level Democratic thinkers have come to addressing the relentless stream of lies was a lazy fantasy about someone finding and funding media personalities to be “the Joe Rogan of the left,” since the Rogans and Theo Vons of the world are considered to be key to how right-wing messaging is absorbed by the public. The absurdity of the solution is obvious when considering that Fox News launched in 1996 with a literally endless barrage of dumb outrages; good old AM talk radio has been right-wing at least since Rush Limbaugh in the 1980s. Podcasting went wide in 2004. A well-delivered truth is always vulnerable to a shameless lie, and it always has been. That’s not going to change without addressing a lot of underlying factors: economic unrest, illiteracy, a lack of civics education. None of this is fixable with Republicans in office.
“It should freak the public out that the Trump administration lies this easily,” U.S. senator Chris Murphy, a Connecticut Democrat, said Jan. 25 on CNN.
It’s the task of an incoming generation of smart, savvy, humane and appealing political operatives to figure out this puzzle. But it’s clear which voices to listen to: the ones who acknowledge upfront that deception is foundational to the Republican party’s national success. To not say this is a lie of omission, and that’s not a valid tactic.
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