Former President Donald Trump has a documented count of falsehoods exceeding 30,000 just during his time in office, and even more are being pushed as he faces down potential indictment for the January 6 attack.
And the Republicans who fail to expose his lies came under scathing criticism from Los Angeles Times columnist Mark Barabak Thursday.
"Birds fly. Fish swim. Politicians say things they hope will get them elected," wrote Barabak. This isn't necessarily evil, he noted. "There is, however, an important qualitative difference between telling voters what they’d like to hear or dialing an issue up or down depending on the audience and knowingly, calculatedly telling a flat-out lie."
That is what Republican loyalists to Trump are doing, wrote Barabak. Even his own opponents for the GOP nomination, like Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, won't openly acknowledge Biden won the election. Instead he, "Suggests it’s wrong to call the assault on the Capitol 'a plan to somehow overthrow the government of the United States.'"
Meanwhile, he noted, polls say Republican voters overwhelmingly back Trump, a large percent believe his lies about the election being stolen, and would even back him despite being found liable for sexual abuse.
This is not the type of fudging of facts that is normal in a democracy, concluded Barabak — this is something much more dangerous.
"Spreading Trump’s corrosive lies — or, at the least, enabling his mendacity by failing to call him out — is no typical infraction, like blithely promising a balanced budget or overstating the benefits of reforming the healthcare system. It’s a knife directly in the heart of our democracy," he wrote. Character, he added, is not just "doing the right thing when nobody's looking ... sometimes it’s doing the right thing when everyone is watching."
