The Republican party will eventually implode from their extended break with reality, especially under Donald Trump. Reality is just an inconvenience for the “alternative facts” that they have been peddling since 2016. We can see this clearly in three simple examples:
- The “stolen” 2020 election.
- The January 6th insurrection.
- The claim that Ukraine started the war.
The “Stolen” 2020 Election
Despite their desperate and repeated efforts to prove that the 2020 election was stolen, Republicans have never been able to produce any credible evidence that it was. Sixty-three court cases later, they had zilch, nada, nothing (other than one Pennsylvania court that found that an insignificant number of mail-in ballots lacked proper identification and were “cured” after Election Day, and should not have been counted, even though that in no way impacted the final outcome).
And then, the embarrassment of the 2024 election. Using the same procedures as the 2020 election, Republicans were suddenly eager to accept the election results because the outcome this time was in their favor. Republican “confidence” in the election process was somehow, miraculously improved. Even though there was quite a bit of evidence that voter suppression was a significant cause for the change in outcome, they happily accepted in nontheless.
The January 6th Insurrection
Donald Trump and Republicans want us to believe that nothing of any importance happened during the January 6th insurrection, and that it was largely peaceful, even though it must have been the most photographed historical event ever. There were three sources for this:
- The vast network of cameras set up inside the Capitol;
- The live-streamed and extensive news coverage;
- The cell phone videos from the insurrectionists themselves.
I remember watching it happen in real time, but even if you happened to miss that, you could see hours of it during the Congressional hearings on January 6th, where massive amounts of videos were played.
I mean, this is straight out of the novel “1984”: The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.
Ukraine Starting the War
On Tuesday of this week, we had the spectacle of President Trump saying this about Ukraine, after his team, led by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, began one-on-one discussions with the Russians, led by Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov: “Today I heard, ‘Oh, well, we weren’t invited.’ Well, you’ve been there for three years. You should have ended it three years ago. You should have never started it. You could have made a deal.”
I’m not quite sure what “deal” Trump thinks Zelensky should have made. Maybe he thinks Zelensky should have given away the republics of Donetsk and Luhansk preemptively without a fight.
Anybody who has followed Putin’s career even a little bit knows that he’s an unreconstructed irredentist. He fancies himself to be the next Alexander the Great, and wants to reconstruct imperial Russia before the Revolution. He apparently thought that invading Ukraine would be a cakewalk, kind of like the “shock and awe” campaign the United States waged against Iraq.
If you think that Putin invading Ukraine because of the Russian speaking minorities there sounds a lot like Hitler invading Czechoslovakia because there were a lot of German speakers in the Sudetenland, you’re on the right track. Of course, students of history might remember that the Nazi annexation of the Sudetenland after the Munich Agreement didn’t keep Hitler from invading the rest of Czechoslovakia.
Oh yeah, but Zelensky should have made a deal.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was justified on the grounds that Ukraine was committing a “genocide” against Russian minorities and that their goal was to “demilitarise and denazify” Ukraine. This, while the Jewish Zelensky lost many of his family members to the Nazi’s in the Second World War, as did much of the Ukrainian population.
Unlike Republicans (apparently), the Ukrainians hate Nazis.
Russians are used to their government subjecting them to completely outrageous lies that no one believes, but here in the United States with our “free press,” we thought we were better than that. But not with Donald Trump as our President.