The Negativity of the Republican party Preceded Trump. He Just Came to Embody It.
by John Lawrence
The vitriol expressed towards Barack Obama by the Republican party existed before Trump even entered the race. The controversy regarding Obama's birth certificate is something that Trump just latched on to and capitalized on as his entree into national politics. He saw an opportunity and he acted on it. During Barack Obama's campaign for president in 2008, throughout his presidency and afterwards, there was extensive news coverage of Obama's religious preference, birthplace, and of the individuals questioning his religious belief and citizenship – efforts eventually known as the "birther movement", by which name it is widely referred to across media. Conspiracy theories proliferated during Obama's run for the Presidency. There were some that encouraged the electoral college not to certify Obama. Activists unsuccessfully lobbied Republican members of Congress to reject the 2008 Electoral College vote and block Obama's election when it came before Congress for certification on January 8, 2009. This set the stage for Trump's unsuccessful attempt to manipulate the electoral college after the 2020 election in which he lost to Joe Biden. Republican finagling with the voting system is nothing new. Neither is their promotion of conspiracy theories in order to defeat their opponents and gain power in the US government.
Donald Trump predicated his run for the Presidency in 2016 on lies and deception. That should have been enough to disqualify him right there. But it wasn't and lies and deception became a staple of Republican, and, therefore, US politics. Lies and deception were mainstreamed and normalized. The New York Times weighed in thusly:
[The fact that Obama was not born in the US] was not true in 2011, when Donald J. Trump mischievously began to question President Obama’s birthplace aloud in television interviews. “I’m starting to think that he was not born here,” he said at the time.
It was not true in 2012, when he took to Twitter to declare that “an ‘extremely credible source’” had called his office to inform him that Mr. Obama’s birth certificate was “a fraud.”
It was not true in 2014, when Mr. Trump invited hackers to “please hack Obama’s college records (destroyed?) and check ‘place of birth.’”
It was never true, any of it. Mr. Obama’s citizenship was never in question. No credible evidence ever suggested otherwise.
In fact, it took Mr. Trump much longer than that: Mr. Obama released his short-form birth certificate from the Hawaii Department of Health in 2008. Most of the world moved on.
But not Mr. Trump.
He nurtured the conspiracy like a poisonous flower, watering and feeding it with an ardor that still baffles and embarrasses many around him.
Mr. Trump called up like-minded sowers of the same corrosive rumor, asking them for advice on how to take a falsehood and make it mainstream in 2011, as he weighed his own run for the White House.
And there you have the essence of corruption in American politics. The fact that anyone can base a political campaign on something that he or she knows to be a lie just because they can get a large portion of the electorate to believe in it is part and parcel of the American system. And now, despite the fact that there is plenty of evidence including 91 indictments that Trump perpetrated a hoax on the American public, still a large number of the American people still believes in him. He has created a personality cult around himself based on lies and deception yet the American system of government so far has not been able to prevent him from possibly attaining the office of President of the United States again! Surely, this is free speech run amok. The First Amendment should not entertain the possibility that lies and conspiracy theories should be left to fester and confuse the American public. Free speech should not allow that lies and deception are allowed into the political arena so that a politician can actually win office by convincing people to believe them. The cult centered around Trump has progressed or degenerated to the point that his believers have their own egos invested in the lies, and so are reluctant to disabuse themselves of them for fear of losing their self identity. It is easier to go on believing what they thought to be true, even though these beliefs have been thoroughly debunked, than it is to admit that they were fooled.
"Over the next 10 days, we get to see the machines that are crooked, the ballots that are fraudulent, and if we’re wrong, we will be made fools of. But if we’re right, a lot of them will go to jail. Let’s have trial by combat. I’m willing to stake my reputation, the President is willing to stake his reputation, on the fact that we’re going to find criminality there."
They were wrong and they have been made fools of. However, a large percentage of the American people are not willing to admit that they have been made fools of. Their collective egos will not entertain that possibility. In order not to think of oneself as a fool, one must go on believing in the lies and deception that Trump is still allowed to spew. His rallies are reminiscent of the rallies of another would be dictator who gained traction with the German people in the 1930s. And still there is no provision in the American constitution or the rule of law that would prevent the dictatorship of Donald Trump from taking place.
