In the 2024 election cycle, the GOP will face this choice: Vanquish the big lies of Trumpism in the Republican presidential primaries or face probable defeat in the general election.
The first task won’t be easy. The Republican base is split between those who see crucial events as they are and those whose views stand at a distinct distance from reality.
Those in the latter camp have been reinforced in their conspiratorialist beliefs by one particular source of misinformation: Fox News.
Dominion Voting Systems’ defamation lawsuit has revealed how little weight factuality carries at Fox. We now know that prime-time broadcasters were fully aware that stolen-elections claims were nonsense. And that they viewed the Trump-affiliated figures serving up that rubbish as somewhere between absurd and insane.
Still, Fox helped pump that pollution into the public domain.
One might think that, after the embarrassing inside-the-network revelations the Dominion lawsuit has occasioned, Fox would clean up its act. But so far there’s little indication that the conservative outlet will quit its conspiracy-theory mongering and start telling its viewers that truth. Indeed, Tucker Carlson, the cable network’s most popular host, this week doubled down on election-denying nonsense.
“In retrospect, it is clear the 2020 election was a grave betrayal of American democracy,” he told viewers. “Given the facts that have since emerged about that election, no honest person can deny it.”
Actually, no honest person would make such a claim. In fact, court suits, recounts, and audits have turned up no credible evidence of widespread fraud. Which is exactly what Donald Trump’s Department of Justice officials and campaign team repeatedly told him.
Without Trump’s lies and Fox’s amplification of them, the vast majority of Americans would realize as much. But on the right, they don’t. Polling shows that 61 percent of Republicans still profess to think Biden won because of election fraud.
Carlson, meanwhile, is on a mission to recast the Jan. 6, 2021, storming of the US Capitol not as the violent, destructive, police-assaulting event Americans saw on TV but rather as a largely peaceful protest that got a little out of hand.
Perhaps Carlson’s own conspiratorialist mindset keeps him from perceiving the truth. Or perhaps, in his role as prime-time pied piper of the GOP’s pugnacious partisans, he is simply playing a fantasia he knows that committed Trump supporters, eager to wish away the stain and shame of the marauding mob, will find beguiling.
Either way, despite his professed private loathing for Trump, Carlson has become a major reinforcer of the reality-denying outlook that holds much of MAGA in its sway.
Trump, meanwhile, has seized on Carlson’s whitewashing of the insurrection as proof that the House’s Jan. 6 committee somehow misled the nation.
“The Unselect Committee of political Hacks & Thugs has been totally discredited,” he wrote on his social media platform. “They knowingly refused to show the Videos that mattered. They should be tried for Fraud and Treason, and those imprisoned and being persecuted should be exonerated and released, NOW!”
Unfortunately for Fox and Carlson, prominent Republicans who were there that day have vehemently rejected his believe-what-I-show-you-not-what-you-saw revisionism.
“Bull[bleep],” judged Senator Thom Tillis, Republican of North Carolina.
“Just a lie,” said Senator Kevin Cramer, Republican of North Dakota.
“It’s so absurd. It’s nonsense,” said Mitt Romney, Republican of Utah and the party’s 2012 nominee.
But contemplate where all this leaves the GOP.
A party peddling falsehoods about things this fundamental — canards recognized as false by at least one-fifth of Republicans and more than three-fifths of independents — is not likely to win the next presidential election.
Yet Trump’s already declared presidential candidacy will be premised not just on the falsehood of a stolen election but almost inevitably on downplaying the Jan. 6 attack he precipitated by telling that lie, calling his supporters to Washington, and sending them to the Capitol to try to stop the peaceful transfer of power. And though he has faded some, the former president remains a major candidate for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination, particularly in a crowded field.
Meanwhile, Carlson has shown he’s willing to propagandize both those lies.
The question for the star-crossed GOP, then, is this: Will any of its other presidential hopefuls step up to persistently and forcefully tell their party the truth?
There’s risk there to be sure but also an opportunity for a candidate ready and willing to position themselves as the primary challenger to Trump — and as a Republican who can actually win the general election.
Scot Lehigh is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at scot.lehigh@globe.com. Follow him @GlobeScotLehigh.