Here's why Trump supporters can't see through his lies

John Stoehr
21 March
FILE PHOTO: Supporters of Donald Trump gather outside a polling station on Election Day in West Palm Beach, Florida, U.S., November 5, 2024. REUTERS/Marco Bello/File Photo

Yesterday, Donald Trump signed a royal decree (ie, an executive order) claiming that the president has the legal and constitutional right to unwind and shut down the United States Department of Education.

He has no such thing, Joe Walsh reminded us. “He can’t dismantle the Department of Education,” he said. “He doesn’t have the constitutional authority to do it. Only Congress does. He’ll get sued and the courts will rule against him. This is unconstitutional. And that matters more than whatever you think about the Department of Education.”

That is true as a matter of principle, and on the strength of federal law and the separation of powers, federal judges have this week handed down a string of rulings against the administration: its shuttering of the US Agency for International Development, its ban on trans military servicemembers and its freeze on billions in climate-change grants.

But it’s less true as a matter of practice.

In the case of the Education Department, Elon Musk’s “DOGE” has already started firing half the people who work there. Trump’s executive order will be challenged and probably stopped by a court, but by then, the agency’s personnel may be so demoralized, and its infrastructure so degraded, that by all intents and purposes, Trump has shut it down, though he has no constitutional authority to do so.

This pattern is being repeated again and again.

The administration does not have the legal or constitutional authority to do a thing that it wants to do – say, for instance, arresting and detaining anyone it dislikes, and deporting them Central America. But by the time the courts catch up – for instance, by holding a hearing on the arrest, detainment and deportation of anyone the administration dislikes to Central America – the crime has already been committed, the only question then being how it’s going to cover up for the crime.

Which is to say, lie.

In case those lies don’t work, however, the administration has another strategy. According to CNN, it plans to drag its feet in response to over 160 (and counting) lawsuits against it in the hope that the rightwing supermajority of the US Supreme Court will decide in its favor. The expectation seems to be that it will reaffirm its prior ruling, which held that the president can’t commit crimes as long as he’s president.

And if that doesn’t work, Trump has another strategy, which is the same as the old strategy, which is to slander and discredit any member of the judiciary who stands in his way, thus creating conditions for picking which rulings to obey and which to disregard, even perhaps decisions made by the US Supreme Court. As one former jurist, a well-known conservative, said this week, Trump has declared war on federal law. I would add that so far, that war has been one-sided.

Even though the administration has so far disobeyed at least two federal judges, both of whom said it cannot deport people it dislikes without further review by the court, that does not constitute a state of emergency, according to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.

In an interview, Schumer suggested that America has not yet reached a moment of “autocratic breakthrough,” as Rachel Maddow put it last month. That would come, he said, when Trump disobeys the Supreme Court, thus triggering “a strong and immediate reaction from one end of the country to the other in ways that we have never seen before.”

He said that if the court of law fails, the defense of democracy would move to the court of public opinion. “The people will have to rise up,” Schumer told MSNBC’s Chris Hayes. “Our democracy will be at stake then. If the people make their voices heard, and stand up, and we join them, I believe we can try to beat that back, we can beat that back.”

Schumer expressed the basic faith in the American people, the same basic faith that lies beneath the widespread assumption (and hope among liberals) that Trump’s policies, specifically his economic policies, are going to hurt his supporters so much his poll numbers will fall, which in turn would creation conditions, as Schumer told the Times last week, for the congressional Republicans to turn on him.

However, this basic faith greatly overestimates the power of the people to determine their own economic interests and greatly understimates the power of president’s propaganda, which to say, Donald Trump’s superpower, which is to say that he lies so often, so hard and so ruthlessly, and that those lies are amplified so widely and deeply by the press corps and the rightwing media, that people who are paying an extortionate price for eggs, for instance, will believe, as one Trump official said this week, that a dozen cost “$2.50 for the whole country.”

People who believe the White House when it says the price of eggs is $2.50 a dozen, even as they are paying $7.50, are not the kind of people who are going to assign him blame for their suffering. And if they do not blame him, his polls numbers are unlikely to fall by much, which in turn would not creation conditions, as Schumer told the Times last week, for the congressional Republicans to finally turn on him.

The great evil unreality that Trump and his people have manufactured with their years of ruthless and malicious lying should give us pause whenever someone like Schumer says there’s no doubt the American people would rise up is disgust against a president who vandalizes the federal government or openly disobeys the US Supreme Court.

That would require the American people to recognize on their own, if they do not have anyone in the Democratic Party to guide them, what a crime looks like when it’s committed by a president who will lie about the crime so much and so hard that it stops looking like a crime.

Vandals also act outside the law, but in time, they are punished.

Will Trump?

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