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When the lies become the story • Daily Montanan [1]

['Russell Rowland', 'Terry Minow', 'Jon Ellingson', 'Elizabeth Marum', 'Barbara Archer', 'Bill Bronson', 'Pete Geddes', 'David Carlson', 'More From Author', 'July']

Date: 2024-07-30

When J.D. Vance was an unknown law partner writing a book about his childhood, I’m sure the thought never crossed his mind that someday every little detail of that book would be scrutinized by the entire country, looking for slight exaggerations or outright lies. Vance is learning the hard way that playing around with the truth might sell books, but it can come back to bite you if you somehow end up going from a relative unknown to a vice presidential candidate for a major party.

Something unprecedented happened when Trump announced his selection for VP. It is pretty much standard, and expected, that a candidate will get a boost in the polls after this announcement. It happens almost without fail. So it must have made the Trump camp very nervous when his announcement of Vance brought an immediate drop in his poll numbers. Knowing Trump’s fan base, it’s unlikely that this drop in the numbers had anything to do with Vance’s precarious grasp of the truth, but for whatever reason, Vance is not resonating with the people who really matter, the ones who will carry this election.

Of course, it was just a few days later that an even bigger announcement brought an even bigger drop: The decision by Joe Biden to drop out of the race. One of the funniest things about that announcement was Trump’s apoplectic claim that his campaign should be reimbursed for all the money they spent trying to discredit Biden. Reimbursed by whom, you might wonder, and I’m sure he didn’t think that far ahead, but of course in Trump world, someone else always pays.

It’s pretty obvious that the preeminent con-man in America was furious about being out-maneuvered, even though the idea that this was a deliberate strategy is absurd. It’s been clear from the start that Biden was determined to carry this through to the end, and it’s not hard to imagine why. Not only is he in much better shape in almost every regard than the man sitting across the room from him, but Biden has also been an incredibly effective president, in ways that are not sexy or dynamic. He brought an economy back to life that was in a complete shambles thanks to Trump’s complete lack of interest.

It seems obvious that Biden’s reluctance to step down was rooted in a basic fundamental human need to believe that doing the job well, and not being convicted of any felonies, was enough of a reason for the general public to support him.

Sadly, we are living in a time where those facts don’t matter to many, many Americans. But maybe these recent shifts in the polls do indicate that undecided voters are coming around. Here in Montana, the results of the primaries seemed to indicate that the stranglehold that the Christian nationalist branch has had on the Republican Party might be losing its grip. The parents of Austin Knudsen, our barely qualified and barely committed to law and order Attorney General, lost in their primary elections in their Eastern Montana districts, and Theresa Manzella, a state senator from one of the reddest districts in the state, in Ravalli County, barely won her primary.

People keep saying that when Trump is gone, and someday soon he will be gone, this authoritarian groundswell in the Republican Party is still going to be a problem, and although it’s obvious that the movement has been growing for decades, I have a very hard time believing it will have the same strength is does now without Trump, for one simple reason: Because there has never been, and probably, hopefully never will be, another American politician who is so completely devoid of a conscience. We’ve had some pretty awful leaders in our past, but never before have we had someone who can tell the world, with a complete straight face, that they don’t know the people who wrote the playbook for their next term in office, even when most of those people are either former members of their staff, or even former cabinet members. Trump’s ability to lie about anything and everything without ever being held to account has become so remarkably effective that may be part of what makes him so compelling is the simple question of when and how it’s finally going to crash in on him. Because, it seems, it inevitably will.

But in the meantime, everyone else, from Ron DeSantis to Nikki Haley to J.D. Vance, has made it clear that they will never match Trump’s ability to do and say the worst things possible and somehow turn them into accomplishments in the eyes of his followers. It takes a special kind of narcissistic sociopath to pull that off, and hopefully nobody waiting in the wings has that kind of pedigree.

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[1] Url: https://dailymontanan.com/2024/07/30/when-the-lies-become-the-story/

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