The Republican Party's Two Sets of Books

As most of you know, on this blog, on our podcast, and on stage and screen, I have long maintained a particular theory about how the Republican Party got itself into this mess. 

They kept two sets of books. 

The first set of books was for the rubes, the bigots and the chucklefucks, who make up the Republican base. And those books were full of absolute nonsense.

Liberals are baby killing, gun-grabbing Commie demons. Trans people are coming for your children. Immigrants are rapists. Tax cuts pay for themselves. The government is always the problem. Whatever scary story or conspiracy theory would keep people angry, frightened, and voting Republican -- that was what went into the first set of books.

And there is no bottom to it. No limit. The Republican base will believe whatever they were told, because the Republican Party spent decades training them to believe it.  But the point of those lies was never really governing. The point was power.

The racism, the conspiracy theories, the fear, the culture-war panic -- those were the keys that unlocked the public treasury. The Republican Party could use Fox News, talk radio, and an entire conservative media ecosystem to push those buttons whenever they needed votes. Then, once they were in power, they could do what they actually wanted to do: deregulate everything, cut taxes for wealthy people, and serve their donors.

That was the first set of books.

Ah, but to keep the country from complete collapse, Republican leadership had to keep a second set of books.  This one contained reality.

That was the book with the spreadsheets and the data and the boring stuff: how economies work, how wars work, how logistics work, how science works, how diseases work. It was the book you actually need if you are trying to run a country.

And for decades, the Republican Party had a strange arrangement. They would loudly scream about all the imaginary horrors from the first set of books to get the base furious enough to elect them, then quietly operate from the second set of books once they were in office.

They would tell their voters that they were going to deport everyone they hated, crush their enemies, restore some imaginary golden age, and punish all the people they had been taught to fear.

Then they would get into office and discover that reality existed. They never delivered the fantasy. They never actually purged the country of all the people they demonized. They never delivered the revenge fantasy they sold their voters.  OMG, they even -- gasp! -- cut deals with those baby killing, gun-grabbing Commie demon Dems!   

And as long as the Republican elites and donors controlled the party, the arrangement sorta worked.

Then along came Trump, and the important thing Trump changed was not the Republican Party's nature. It was that he simply burned the second set of books. Trump decided he didn't need the reality-based ledger anymore. He operated entirely from the first set of books.

He told the base: Yes. I really am going to give you everything you dreamed of. I will punish the people you hate. I will hurt the people you fear. I will break the rules for you. And in exchange, you will let me loot the place.

That was the deal.  And it still is.

The Republican Party had always used fantasy as a political weapon. Trump simply stopped pretending that reality existed at all.  He looked at the spreadsheets, the facts, the experts, the institutions, and basically said: screw it. We don't need any of that.

It was the same kind of thinking that led people throughout history into disasters: don't worry about the details, don't worry about logistics, don't worry about reality.  We can definitely invade the Soviet Union and conquer it in two, three months tops because we're awesome!  We always win because we are awesome!

A triumph of the will, if you will.  And when the Dear Leader lives in that mindspace, facts are no longer an issue.

This was from me in September of 2016 -- years before anything called "Never Trump", and decades before Never Trumpers sloooooly and grudgingly began to accept that the real problem with the Republican party is that it's full of Republicans. 

Once you start to notice that a depressingly large number of our fellow citizens have become reprogrammable Orwellian meat-puppets, the rise of Trump is not hard to understand at all.

And this was the citation from Orwell I was using:

"Reality is inside the skull. You will learn by degrees, Winston. There is nothing that we could not do. Invisibility, levitation -- anything. I could float off this floor like a soap bubble if I wish to. I do not wish to, because the Party does not wish it. You must get rid of those 19th century ideas about the laws of Nature.  We make the laws of Nature."  -- O'Brien, 1984 

And this is how Republicans operate all the time now.  Everywhere.  Except there are still places where reality has a way of forcing itself back into the room.

The courtroom is one of those places.

Outside the courtroom, operating from the first set of books, Republicans can and do say anything. They can invent stories about reflecting pools, election fraud, conspiracies, whatever. They can feed the base whatever toxic slop they want because nobody is forcing them to prove it.

But eventually somebody crosses the border between fantasy and reality.

That's what happened to Jeanine Pirro.

When she is on television, playing to the audience, she can live in the first set of books. She can repeat whatever bullshit the audience wants to hear.

But when she walks into a courtroom, she has crossed into domain of the second set of books.

Here, there are rules. Here, tangible evidence matters.  In fact, it's pretty much all that matters.   In here there are questions that can't be dodged, wriggled out of, or dismissed with a demeaning insult.  And most importantly, in here there are now consequences for lying.

And once you've crossed the membrane between the domain where Boxwine Pirro spends most of her time, where Doug Burgam and Donald Trump can lie all they want to because, as long as they keep feeding the bigots and imbeciles the lies they want to hear, they are rewarded for lying...

...and the domain of the courtroom, suddenly all the things that worked outside the courtroom don't work anymore.

In here lawyers and judges get to demand that you show actual evidence.   Where are the photographs? Where are the witnesses? Where is the chain of proof ?  In here, Trump regime's lies and bluster  evaporate like fairy gold once the enchantment has been broken.

This stupid Reflecting Pool fuck-up is the Decline and Fall of the Republican Party in microcosm, because reality is the wall Republicans keep slamming into. They have spent decades building a political machine fueled entirely by bullshit from a fantasy universe where nothing has to be proven.  Because the base doesn't want facts.  They hate facts.  They demand the story they were promised -- the toxic slop they now crave like crack, which is why the people who feed them that slop keep getting elected.

But science doesn't work that way.  The law doesn't work that way. Reality doesn't work that way.

We saw it with COVID. The refusal to respect facts and science had real consequences. People died because this administration and its allies chose political fantasy over reality.  And now we see the same pattern in something as small and ridiculous as the reflecting pool fiasco.

Trump made a bet that he could hire one of his mobbed up stooges to slap some paint, declare victory, and everyone would accept the story.  Which is pretty much his same "strategy" in Iran.  When reality pushed back, the response was exactly what it has always been.  Find a scapegoat. Find a boogeyman. Blame somebody else.

For example, from MSNOW:

On questions about depleted munitions, Team Trump struggles to keep its story straight

To recap, the depleted stockpiles aren’t depleted, though they could be better, and everyone should blame Joe Biden.

But eventually you run into the problem that every authoritarian movement runs into.  There are still places where facts matter.  There are still institutions where you cannot simply scream louder than everyone else and reality goes away.

Which is why they keep losing.  The more you force them into arenas where they have to answer questions, produce evidence, and defend their claims, the more exposed they become.

Because their alternative to reality is always the same thing: Scream louder. Blame immigrants. Blame Muslims. Blame liberals. Blame trans kids.  Blame anyone except themselves and their catastrophic decisions and failure.  And the louder they scream, the clearer it becomes that they have nothing else.

Look at the Republican campaign ads flooding the country right now. They have money. They have the machinery. But what do they have to run on?  Trump has wrecked the economy. He has driven up prices. His tariffs have hurt consumers. His foreign policy disasters are piling up.

So what is left?

The first set of books.  Fear. Rage. Racism. Resentment.

Because that is all they have.

It cracks me up with I see headlines from anonymous sources about Republicans getting nervous about Trump hurting their chances in the midterms.  Hey dum-dums, what it is about ""Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer" that you do not understand?  Because that, sure as shit, is what you signed up for.  

Trump is the Republican Party.  Trump is the movement.  You no longer have an independent identity separate from him. You are not partners, or pals, or peers.  You are a tool he can use and discard. You are mere cells in the body of Trumpism.

This is the bargain you accepted when you handed your party over to someone who never cared about the second set of books.  Someone who never cared about reality.  Someone who only cared about the first set of books — the one where every lie is true as long as enough people want to believe it.

 But eventually, reality always comes looking for payback.

And payback is a bitch.