The Big Lie

The most terrifying thing about Trump is his increasingly blatant inclination toward autocracy. Inclination may be too nice a word for it.

A huge part of this is Trump’s shameless, undisguised lying. “Donald is a believer in the big-lie theory,” one of his lawyers told Vanity Fair nearly thirty years ago. “If you say something again and again, people will believe you.”

The Big Lie is pure Hitler, and Trump is – or was then – a reader of the Führer’s speeches. I don’t know the exact origins of the Big Lie, but Hitler coined the phrase in Mein Kampf. He wrote that people simply cannot believe anyone “could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.”

Like Trump and his “fake news” lie.

Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda, said “the most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly – it must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over.”

Trump and his minions have been doing just that. Now they are raising the stakes with new, unbridled bullshit about a “secret society” within the Justice Department, one intent on bringing Trump down. [Update: now they are backing off that claim.]

Where is the powerful senator putting country above party – speaking plain truth about all that is wrong with this picture?

One senator said: “It is high time that we all stopped being tools and victims of totalitarian techniques – techniques that, if continued here unchecked, will surely end what we have come to cherish as the American way of life.”

Strong words – but they were spoken nearly seventy years ago by Margaret Chase Smith, a Republican Senator from Maine. Taken from her famous “Declaration of Conscience,” they were in opposition to Sen. Joseph McCarthy during his reign of terror.

“I speak as a Republican,” she said. “I speak as a woman. I speak as a United States Senator. I speak as an American.” And all Americans, she said, have “the right to criticize; the right to hold unpopular beliefs; the right to protest, the right of independent thought.”

The country survived McCarthy, but I’m not so sure it will survive Trump. He is a wannabe autocrat leading us headlong into a totalitarian state.

I keep thinking about this Frank Zappa song: