Opinion

You have noticed by now we are living through a backlash. I’m talking about the backlash against the progressive gains made in the wake of George Floyd’s murder by a white police officer. After the country witnessed that crime, the business world was awash in the rhetoric of diversity, equity and inclusion. Years later, however, not so much.

Why? A lot of white people didn’t like it. Fueled by Donald Trump, the Republicans and the rightwing media apparatus, there has been a titanic reaction against well-intended (though feeble) attempts by America’s biggest corporations to make society fairer and better.

In less than a month, Republicans will meet in Milwaukee to crown Donald Trump as their Emperor King and Sun God. But the real powers behind the GOP — the billionaires and their institutions that created Project 2025 as a how-to manual to convert American democracy into something like the old Confederacy — don’t much care about poor old Donald.

Sure, they want him to be the nominee because NBC trained him well in the dark art of playing a successful businessman on television. He brings in the rubes like nobody since Huey Long; he’s a singularly brilliant politician, much as Putin, Hitler, Orbán, and Mussolini are and were.

Have you noticed how rarely Republicans talk about actual issues?

— They rant about brown people pouring over the southern border but refuse to even discuss what could be done about it. In fact, when the Senate came up with a workable solution, Republicans in the House killed it at the insistence of Donald Trump. No policies, no solutions other than a Nazi-like round-up of 11 million people and a series of concentration camps.

Last Monday’s edition of the Editorial Board was about what you would say to someone who believes the economy is terrible. In fact, this is best economy we have seen in half a century. A lot of people, however, aren’t feeling it, according to some polls. “What would you say?” I asked readers. The answers were equal parts illuminating and shrewd.

Today, I want to tell you what I think.

Hitler’s brilliant propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, famously told the Fuhrer, “Repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth.” Donald Trump and the MAGA faction of the Republican Party have taken Goebbels’ advice to heart, and it’s going to make this fall’s election one like we’ve never seen before.

Already they’ve been lying so often and so effectively that nearly all Republicans, and majorities or near-majorities of Americans, believe: