The Destructionists, page 24
Senate Republicans put across-the-board “holds” on President Obama’s nominees to executive and judicial positions. Republicans launched filibusters even against items they overwhelmingly supported, such as extending unemployment benefits. They refused to confirm officials to head key agencies unless the administration agreed to changes in law. McConnell in 2009 embraced legislation creating a deficit reduction task force, calling it “our best hope” and urging Obama’s support. But when Obama actually did support it, McConnell joined a Republican filibuster to block the task force.
Under McConnell, Republican opposition to Obama was reflexive. Senate party unity votes—in which majorities of each party are on opposite sides—hit 72 percent in 2009 and 78.6 percent in 2010, shattering records going back to 1953 when Congressional Quarterly began measuring such a thing. This was gridlock by design—not to force compromise but to weaken the other side and thereby build GOP power.
In the entire history of the republic up to 2009, a total of sixty-eight judicial nominees had been blocked by Senate filibuster. Five years into Obama’s term, McConnell’s Republicans had blocked seventy-nine judicial nominees by filibuster—more than in the previous 225 years combined.
There had been skirmishes over judicial filibusters before. When Senate Republicans had threatened to abolish the filibuster (the nuclear option) in 2005, a compromise by the bipartisan “Gang of Fourteen” senators had averted the showdown. But in 2013, there was no compromise to be found. Democrats, facing McConnell’s boundless intransigence, invoked the nuclear option for presidential nominees other than Supreme Court justices.
When McConnell’s Republicans took over the Senate majority in 2015, McConnell slowed confirmation of Obama’s judicial nominees to a historic low. Only 28.6 percent of Obama’s nominees were confirmed in the final two years of Obama’s presidency, according to the Congressional Research Service—by far the lowest in the period going back to 1977 that the CRS examined. McConnell’s actions gave Trump more than one hundred judicial vacancies to fill on day one (and the confirmation rate for Trump’s judges shot all the way up to 83.8 percent).
The most famous of those vacancies was Scalia’s seat on the Supreme Court. Ignoring precedent, McConnell devised a new principle to suit his situation: “We think the important principle in the middle of this presidential year is that the American people need to weigh in and decide who’s going to make this decision. Not this lame duck president on the way out the door, but the next president.”
Obama’s nominee, Merrick Garland, never got a hearing. Most Republican senators refused even to meet him.
After Trump’s election, McConnell hurriedly confirmed Trump nominee Neil Gorsuch to Scalia’s seat. He did it by detonating the nuclear option and abolishing the filibuster—the very thing that, four years earlier, McConnell had said would mean “the end of the Senate,” and would be “un-American” and a threat to “the future of our country.”
McConnell called his Garland blockade “the most important decision I’ve made in my political career,” and he boasted: “One of my proudest moments was when I looked Barack Obama in the eye and I said, ‘Mr. President, you will not fill the Supreme Court vacancy.’ ”
Asked in 2019 what would happen if a Supreme Court justice died in 2020, with a Republican in the White House, McConnell broke into a broad grin. “Oh, we’d fill it,” he said.
And so he did. Just eighty minutes after the first report of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death in September 2020, McConnell announced his intent to replace her as fast as possible, before the next president was sworn in. Even Trump showed more humanity at first, invoking the traditional Jewish expression for the dead.
After refusing to consider Garland more than eight months before a presidential election, McConnell jammed through a successor to Ginsburg eight days before a presidential election.
The court’s naked partisanship, and McConnell’s naked power grab, had a predictable effect. In 2000, before the Bush v. Gore decision, 62 percent of Americans approved of the Supreme Court. By 2021, that had fallen to 40 percent, an all-time low in Gallup’s polling history. Disapproval reached a record-high 53 percent.
It was quite an achievement: not only had McConnell managed to destroy the self-proclaimed “world’s greatest deliberative body,” but he had also destroyed the credibility of the highest court in the land.
CHAPTER 13
Truth Isn’t Truth
Sixteen days after President Donald Trump lost the 2020 election, his “personal lawyer,” Rudy Giuliani, stood with other Trump defenders in the headquarters of the Republican National Committee, delivering the most fantastical claims.
Democrats rigged the voting machines!
Liberal billionaire George Soros was involved!
Deceased Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chávez was connected!
Trucks delivered ballots stuffed in garbage bags in the middle of the night!
Dead people voted!
Rounding out the inventive presentation, Giuliani cited a scene from the 1992 comedy film My Cousin Vinny.
The GOP’s quarter-century war on facts had come to this: a gargantuan fabrication aimed at discrediting democracy itself, authored by the president’s team, delivered from GOP headquarters—and carried live by Fox News. The Washington Post fact-checker, Glenn Kessler, saved his “Four Pinocchios” rating for the most egregious falsehoods, but after Giuliani’s “truly bonkers” presentation he lamented: “This is one of those days when we wished we had more than Four Pinocchios.”
As Giuliani delivered his lies, he began to perspire. The perspiration melted hair coloring that had been applied to his sideburns, causing a river of dark liquid to trickle down his cheek. It was as if his brain had liquefied from generating so much disinformation.
For Giuliani, it was the most humiliating episode since, well, twelve days earlier, when he stood outside Philadelphia’s Four Seasons Total Landscaping, in the shadow of a porn shop, to level bogus allegations about Pennsylvania voter fraud—some of which had already been thrown out of court. The location, possibly chosen by Trump aides who confused it with the Four Seasons hotel, was never fully explained, but the landscaping business made a tidy sum after Giuliani’s news conference by marketing T-shirts that said “Make America Rake Again” and “Lawn & Order.”
The man once known as “America’s mayor” had become a national joke.
Giuliani had a charmed career. In the 1980s, as U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, he policed Wall Street and cracked down on organized crime. In the 1990s, he was the popular two-term mayor of New York at a time when violent crime fell sharply. His handling of the 2001 attacks made him famous, an honorary Knight of the British Empire and Time’s Person of the Year. After making a killing in the private sector, he was the national front-runner for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination and might have prevailed but for a flawed strategy of gambling everything on the Florida primary.
But then, in 2016, Giuliani boarded the Trump train, becoming an outspoken defender of the candidate and president while playing on his access to gain foreign clients. He quickly went off the rails.
His downfall—variations of which countless respectable Republicans performed as they surrendered to Trump—is the story of how the GOP, after decades of assaulting facts, science, and expertise, became so immune to the sway of truth that it could be taken over by a charlatan whose only overlap with factual accuracy came via random chance.
This triumph of disinformation had been a long time in the making. Since the Vince Foster “murder” in the 1990s, Republican leaders had been feeding their voters a steady diet of fabrications: Troopergate. Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. Black helicopters. Death panels. Benghazi. Hillary Clinton’s brain damage. Birtherism. They, and their allies on talk radio, the web, and Fox News, had conditioned their supporters to disbelieve anything that came from the media, from scientists, from experts, from Democrats, and from the U.S. government. GOP leaders’ steady production of disinformation, aggravated by social media algorithms that spread falsehood and vitriol, had left the Republican electorate susceptible to all manner of conspiracy theories and propaganda. All that was needed was for an unprincipled demagogue to ply his wares.
Trump could not have happened without the acquiescence, and even the active support, of Republican elected officials and conservative opinion leaders, particularly Fox News hosts. One by one, a limitless cast of enablers swallowed hard, abandoned conscience, and embraced Trump’s fantasies as fact, condoning, echoing, or even building upon his fabrications. Without this validation, the Republican electorate could not have solidified behind Trump.
There was, for example, Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who once called Trump a “jackass” who was “unfit for office.” He became a prime validator of Trump’s falsehoods, embracing the “no collusion” mantra and instead alleging (unfounded) “corruption” at the Justice Department and the FBI, a key part of the “deep state” conspiracy theory. Graham said he embraced Trump “to be relevant”—in exchange for his integrity.
Devin Nunes, with some help from the Trump White House, used his position as top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee to bolster Trump’s misleading claims that the FBI had spied on Trump and based its Russia probe on information provided by Democrats. (Nunes later quit Congress to be CEO of Trump Media.)
After a meeting in which Trump, according to multiple witnesses, referred to African nations as “shithole countries,” Republican senators Tom Cotton of Arkansas and David Perdue of Georgia covered for Trump, claiming they didn’t hear that phrase.
Trump was obese, had heart disease, ate fast food, and didn’t exercise, but the White House physician, Ronny Jackson, declared that he was in “excellent health” with “incredible cardiac fitness” and “if he had a healthier diet over the last 20 years, he might live to be 200 years old.” (The doctor is now a Republican member of Congress.)
Trump’s attorney general, Bill Barr, committed similar malpractice to promote Trump’s alternate reality, but with much higher stakes. When special prosecutor Robert Mueller issued his damning report on the Trump campaign’s Russia ties, Barr sat on it. Instead, he released a memo and gave a news conference in which he claimed that Mueller found “there was in fact no collusion” between the Trump campaign and Russia, and that Mueller’s evidence was insufficient to merit charges of obstructing justice. But Mueller had reached no such conclusions, and he complained that Barr caused “public confusion” by missing the “substance of this office’s work and conclusions.”
Why would previously reputable figures throw aside their credibility and join Trump in fantasyland? The simple explanation is these Republican elites were opportunistically supporting claims they knew to be false because it furthered their personal ambitions or partisan aims. But it may be more complex than that: these elites weren’t just deceiving others, but also themselves. Cognitive science has found that highly intelligent people are more susceptible to “identity-protective cognition,” an unconscious process of “motivated reasoning” in which they use their intellect to justify rejecting facts inconsistent with their partisan identity. “The really upsetting finding is that the better you are at particular types of cognitive tests…the better you are at manipulating the facts to reflect your prior beliefs, the more able you are to cognitively shape the world so it fits with your values,” David Hoffman, University of Pennsylvania law professor who studies cultural cognition, explained to me. We all slip into such “motivated reasoning” to some degree, but it became a particular problem on the right because of the Fox News influence and the weaponization of disinformation by Republican leaders.
The lying spread through Trump world like a cancer. Trump adviser Roger Stone was convicted on seven counts of lying to Congress, obstruction, and witness tampering related to lies he told about his communications with WikiLeaks about its release of emails that would damage Clinton’s campaign in 2016. Trump pardoned him. Michael Flynn, Trump’s national security adviser, pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his contacts with the Russian government. Trump pardoned him. Paul Manafort, Trump’s campaign chairman, pleaded guilty to violating lobbying laws and witness tampering over his work for a pro-Russian Ukrainian politician, and a judge found that he had lied to prosecutors, the FBI, and a grand jury. Trump pardoned him. Campaign aide George Papadopoulos pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI. Trump pardoned him. Trump advisers Rick Gates and Michael Cohen also pleaded guilty to lying to authorities—but, because they cooperated with prosecutors, Trump didn’t pardon them.
During Manafort’s sentencing, where his lawyers once again falsely represented the facts in the case, Judge Amy Berman Jackson offered this thought: “If people don’t have the facts, democracy can’t work. Court is one of those places where facts still matter.”
Kirstjen Nielsen, Trump’s homeland security secretary, boldly asserted that “we do not have a policy of separating families at the border. Period.” She later stood next to Trump as he signed an order rescinding the policy they supposedly didn’t have. Nielsen, under oath, also made the absurd claim that the cages used to hold migrant children at the border were not, in fact, cages. She also testified that “I actually do not know” if Norway (from which Trump wanted more immigrants) is a predominantly white country.
Administration officials often tried to corroborate Trump’s false claims, “scrambling to reverse-engineer policies to meet Trump’s sudden public promises—or to search for evidence buttressing his conspiracy theories and falsehoods,” as The Washington Post’s Philip Rucker and Ashley Parker put it.
The White House set up a presidential commission to back up Trump’s false claim of widespread voter fraud; it disbanded without finding any. He falsely said voters would receive a 10 percent tax cut before the midterm elections; aides tried to produce evidence that this was happening (it wasn’t). Aides tried to substantiate his unfounded claim that “unknown Middle Easterners” were in a migrant caravan in Mexico. White House officials doctored a video to make it appear that CNN’s Jim Acosta, who annoyed Trump with aggressive questioning at a news conference, had placed “his hands on a young woman” at the event.
Trump claimed that smugglers were binding and gagging migrant women with duct tape and that Muslim prayer rugs were found at the border. A senior Border Patrol official asked agents to produce evidence to support Trump’s claims, but they came up empty—probably because the details cited came from the 2018 Benicio del Toro movie Sicario: Day of the Soldado.
During the 2016 campaign, Trump’s Republican rivals shared Trump’s hostility to science. Scott Walker, the Wisconsin governor, wouldn’t even endorse the theory of evolution. “I’m going to punt on that,” he said. In 2017, Lamar Smith of Texas, the Republican chairman of the House Science Committee, announced at a hearing that “much of climate science today appears to be based more on exaggerations, personal agendas, and questionable predictions than on the scientific method.”
Republicans also shared Trump’s fondness for Obama conspiracy theories. During the 2016 campaign, Walker and fellow candidate Rick Santorum refused to say whether President Obama was Christian—a variation of the Birther libel—and candidate Chris Christie insisted, falsely, that Trump had not pursued the Birther allegations for years.
Because the disinformation preceded Trump in the GOP, it didn’t end with his presidency. Republican lawmakers and governors devoted much of 2021 to raising doubts about the safety of the Covid-19 vaccines and endorsing conspiracy theories about public health efforts to contain the pandemic.
Representative Madison Cawthorn, a hotheaded Republican from North Carolina, said President Biden’s attempts to boost vaccination rates with a door-to-door outreach campaign would lead to programs to “take your guns” and “take your Bibles.” Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, in one of the Georgia Republican’s many Holocaust comparisons, sounded the alarm about “medical brown shirts showing up at their door ordering vaccinations” as part of a “human experiment.” Representative Jason Smith, a Republican Senate candidate in Missouri, warned of “KGB-style” agents knocking on doors of unvaccinated Americans.
Meanwhile, Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, ordered schools in his state not to impose mask mandates; about half of Florida’s public schools defied his order. Texas’s Republican governor, Greg Abbott, also banned mask mandates and blocked local governments and even private businesses from requiring vaccination. Mississippi’s Republican governor, Tate Reeves, called Biden “tyrannical” for requiring vaccines.
The Republican-controlled House in Ohio invited expert testimony from osteopath Sherri Tenpenny, who testified that the Covid vaccine made people magnetic. “I’m sure you’ve seen the pictures all over the Internet,” she testified. “They can put a key on their forehead, it sticks.”
Senator Ron Johnson, a Wisconsin Republican, promoted the use of ivermectin, a drug commonly used for deworming horses, as a Covid remedy (he earlier held a hearing promoting hydroxychloroquine for the same purpose). So did Rand Paul and Representative Louie Gohmert, a Texas Republican. The idea caused an increase in calls to poison control centers, and the Food and Drug Administration tried to stop the madness with a public service announcement: “You are not a horse.”
Behind much of this craziness was Fox News, and in particular Tucker Carlson, who was now an angry, paranoid TV host whose prime-time show premiered on Fox News just days after the election of an angry, paranoid president. Carlson, with his wild conspiracy theories, soon eclipsed Hannity as Fox’s top-rated host.
