The Bigly Lie
Donald Trump, a humiliated little girl who still cannot understand, let alone accept, that he was only president in the first place because the Republican Party establishment anointed him as its (highly effective) blunt instrument with which to destroy their hated Tea Party grassroots opposition, is now out there simpering to his cult from their shared alternative universe — Soreloserdom, let us officially dub it — that they must never again support RINOs (Republicans In Name Only) with their political donations. Instead, he declares, in the style of the millionaire evangelical hucksters who did so much to prop up his reality TV presidency, that those who want to “make America great again” — and who are too stupid to realize that Donald Trump is the absolute antithesis of everything that made America great in the first place — must now donate to his very own Save America PAC.
The bigly lie at the center of Trump’s cash-sucking hoax, of course — the kind of lie so yuge and obvious that only a truly sociopathic self-promoter would dare to push it — is that Donald Trump is not himself the ultimate, all-time emblem of the RINO faction of the GOP. In truth, Trump is provably, or rather self-evidently, neither a fiscal nor a social conservative. He neither knows the words, nor shares the spirit, of the United States’ founding in any way whatsoever. He is a firm believer in the supreme power of the executive branch. He believes federal government largesse and extreme economic protectionism are both justifiable and desirable problem-solving methods. He is wantonly inclined to increase government debt at the drop of a hat. His view of good citizenship (and good political representation) is reducible in practice to a manipulative blend of propagandistic jingoism and the personal worship of Donald Trump.
Furthermore, he was a major financial and rhetorical supporter of the Republican Party establishment (and therefore a direct obstacle to the party’s constitutionalist minority) for many years, from Mitch McConnell and John Boehner on down. From the earliest days after his election in 2016, he made the appointment of establishment cronies a priority of his administration, including the RNC’s acting chairman at the time, Reince Priebus, and even McConnell’s own wife Elaine Chao, who became one of the few administration appointees to survive Trump’s entire term in office.
But now Trump tells his millions of remaining dupes to give their money to him — because he knows how to run a political action committee, how to choose good candidates, how to use funds in an honorable and trustworthy way, and of course how to make America great again, in spite of having spent the past five years helping the establishment grease the wheels for the final undoing of whatever little was left of a once-great republic.
In the end, however, it all mattered very little. The fact that a man as vacuous and fraudulent — as famously vacuous and fraudulent — as Donald Trump could garner enough support to get within a thousand miles of high elected office in the first place (and primarily support from the supposed conservative grassroots, no less) was all the evidence a sober observer needed to recognize that there was no longer anything left to save.
