If the revelation that an ambitious politician says one thing to one audience and another to somebody else comes as a shock to you, you might want to get out more.
While the sheer scale and quantity of their falsehoods lead to speculation that politicians are born with a particular laryngeal feature that facilitates speech from both sides of the mouth, it’s only because of the very public nature of their work that their mendacity gets so much attention.
The phenomenon is in fact ubiquitous. The benefits of instrumental mendacity — the wilful telling of falsehoods to advance one’s own interests — are so large that only a few saintly figures in human history have been able to resist the temptation. And even then, we learn that history probably lied about their truthfulness. Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.
So it’s not exactly shocking to discover, in a new book by New York Times reporters Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns, that House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy told fellow GOP leaders on a conference call a few days after last year’s Capitol riot, that he was going to tell then president Trump that he would be impeached for his role and should resign.
It was embarrassing for McCarthy that, while he emphatically denied that he had said the words, it turned out that someone had an audiotape. But while that falsehood was quickly exposed, we don’t know whether the more substantive thing — what he actually said on the call — was sincere.
It is quite possible that McCarthy fully intended at the time to give Trump the full force of his disapproval. He wouldn’t have been the first critic to get cold feet in the volcanic presidential presence. The French have a term, “the spirit of the staircase,” which describes a rejoinder that occurs to you after you’ve left a gathering. McCarthy might have been channelling the spirit of the Oval Office waiting area.
But it says something about the malaise in the very soul of the Republican Party that so many of its prominent members say one thing behind Trump’s back and another to his face.
Democrats speak a lot about the “big lie” that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. But the continuing bigger and more consequential lie is the fundamental dishonesty at the heart of the relationship between the Republican Party and Trump himself.
It may or may not come as a shock to you, dear reader, to learn that the fervent desire of much of the Republican Party’s top brass, its major donors, business leaders who urgently crave a Republican restoration, and many of the party’s most prominent supporters in the media and elsewhere, is for Trump to break the habits of a lifetime and go quietly away.
It is a desire expressed as fervently in private as it is assiduously and dexterously avoided in public. But the big lie of this duplicitous relationship requires them to utter multiple, smaller, cascading fictions.
With the exception of a few demented types in congress and the media, they don’t believe that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump. They don’t think that the January 6 riot was a legitimate act of protest or the work of federal agents provocateurs. They fear that a Trump-led Republican ticket presents them with a lose-lose proposition in 2024: Either he continues his well-established pattern of losing the party elections — the 2018 midterms, the 2020 general election, the 2021 Georgia senate runoffs — or he wins and condemns them to another, potentially even more chaotic four years of his distinctive leadership.
The prayerful, desperate hope of most of them is that somehow he doesn’t run again in 2024, a wish that every day looks less likely to be fulfilled. Some of them hope, with or without malice, that he might be too old or somehow physically incapacitated from running again.
Of course they say none of this where it might be heard and relayed back to the man himself. They dare not risk his wrath or the retribution of voters for whom the man, not the party, is what matters.
But the Republican Party is too important a political institution to continue to be a vehicle for this grand deception. The mess the other party has made of the country in 15 months is too extensive to risk the chance of further damage. There are too many capable Republicans who uphold high conservative ideals while embracing the populist values that are energising the party’s base, understand the need to abide by the US constitution, and believe in the importance of a Republican victory more than the satisfaction of their own self-grievance for it to be willingly shackled once again to the vanities of a cynical opportunist.
Will someone speak that truth at least?
The Wall Street Journal
More Coverage
We’ll need a bigger axe, says Musk
The White House’s DOGE has drawn scrutiny for the rapid work of its technology team burrowing into multiple agencies, but it also says it has identified and cut more than $US1bn in spending.
‘Starved, emaciated, pained’: Israel shocked at sight of freed hostages
Israeli president accuses Hamas of a crime against humanity as the families of Or Levy, Ohad Ben Ami and Eli Sharabi react in horror at the men’s frailty after they were paraded on stage by their captors.