The Right Believes Its Own Lies – Here’s Why That’s Bad For Donald Trump

The Cheap Fake Party Doubles Down On Unreality

Conservatives and the mainstream media have successfully made President Joe Biden’s age an issue in the 2024 presidential election. As is clear to any neutral observer, Biden is slower and quieter than he once was, particularly in comparison to the image he had when he was first elected Vice President in 2008. Of course, that was sixteen years ago, and I would challenge you to find anyone who is exactly the same as they were sixteen years ago. Certainly, I had far fewer gray hairs and pops in my knees when I was thirty than I do now.

But for conservatism and the Republican Party, this is never enough. They always have to take things past eleven and into the ludicrous zone. So not only is Biden old, but in the world of the Republican National Committee and Fox News and the remainder of the conservative political/media world, Biden is every caricature possible of a dementia-riddled octogenarian. The conservative commitment to the bit is so extensive that they now have to invest in the production of deepfake and “cheap fake” videos that falsely depict so-called episodes of Biden’s maladies.

Where the problem lies for conservatives is that many Republican voters believe in the fake world they set up. I’ve long argued that it doesn’t truly matter whether conservative leaders and outlets believe the lies they are disseminating, as long as their voters buy into it and vote accordingly. But I definitely believe that Donald Trump, who is not just the leader of the American conservative movement but dumb enough to believe what he sees on Fox News and the rest, is a true believer in most of this.

That means the right continually sets the bar absurdly low for Biden. They construct a reality made up of fake clips and slick propaganda, but then the moment comes when the diehard true believers must see something they hate: Reality.

Most recently we saw this dynamic play out with Biden’s 2024 State of the Union speech. It was one of the best speeches Biden has ever delivered and laid out in many ways his case to the public for a second term. What didn’t show up in Biden’s speech was the whacked-out husk of Biden that appears on Fox News alongside innuendo that he is merely a puppet of former President Obama, the radical left, or something in-between (maybe also space aliens?)

When this moment of reckoning occurs, conservatives could make a reassessment of the lies they’ve told themselves and instead independently consider the areas in which their political rivals are successful or talented (I’ve personally done this with figures I loathe like Trump and former President George W. Bush to pick apart what can be stolen from them). But that is not the way of the right.

No, instead they embrace a conspiracy they first offered up in 2020 and are promoting ahead of this year’s first presidential debate: Surely Biden is on drugs. No, in the conservative mind it just isn’t possible that Biden, who has been deeply involved in national American politics since the 1970s, actually knows how to handle himself in a campaign. Nope. He’s on some kind of drug regimen that works, apparently, like Viagra for campaign speeches.

This kind of thing of course is not limited to the right’s interactions with Biden. It’s sort of forgotten now, but a big part of the right’s response to Obama was the claim that he only made those great speeches because he used a teleprompter. Every politician (including Trump, thought it doesn’t seem like it) uses a prompter. But the right attempted to scandalize its usage by Obama, who is objectively one of the most gifted orators to hold the position, if not one of the best speechmakers in American history.

The public outside of the right-wing bubble could plainly see that not only could Obama communicate without a teleprompter, but that he was extraordinarily nimble when it came to public speaking. Obama was able to deliver zingers on the fly, react in real time to audience disruptions without freezing up, and spoke at length extemporaneously about very complex issues.

The right believed its own lie and the reality overwhelmed it.

You also see this dynamic playing out with rural Republicans dying of COVID after their thought leaders told them the virus was a Democratic hoax and that masking and isolation was unnecessary. Or when Trump and others tell them not to do voting by mail or employ vote harvesting, only to see Republican candidates lose because while Democrats get out the vote the right is looking for the latest conspiracy theory.

I’ve made no secret of the fact that I admire the right’s mastery of communications techniques, and do not believe that they are automatically tainted and out of bounds because the techniques would work just fine (if not more so) with the truth.

But the conservative habit of truly believing in a fake world, then being forced to double down on that fake world because the alternative – dealing with reality – is too much to ask, is a weakness. The right is very good at lying in a manner that has weakened America to the core, but it leaves the Republican Party and the wider conservative movement in a bad position.

Acknowledging and handling reality are key to running a successful political movement. The right is terrible at this simple function, and that is bad for the party and particularly it’s chief dupe, Donald Trump.

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— Oliver

Follow me, Oliver Willis, on Threads @owillis1977

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