You never have to hand it to Donald Trump, but he probably missed his calling as an insult comic. Consider “Lyin’ Ted” Cruz: It’s funny because it’s true.
Earlier this year, Cruz, who voted against accepting the results of the 2020 election, performed some of his trademark odious groveling before unofficial Republican Party chairman Tucker Carlson after Carlson called him out for accurately describing the Jan. 6 insurrection as a “violent terrorist attack.” (I wrote about it here.)
Fast forward four months to Monday’s Sean Hannity show, and sure enough, Ted’s lyin’. The deadly insurrection he once described as a terrorist attack is now a peaceful protest, but peaceful demonstrations outside the homes of Supreme Court justices on the cusp of repealing Roe v Wade? Those are akin to terrorism.
“On January 6 of 2021, you had tens of thousands of people peacefully protesting, and yet the corporate media and Democrats slander them with the made-up term ‘insurrectionist,’” Cruz told Hannity. “And yet in this instance, they are not willing to call off their goons even now, even now as this has the potential to escalate, and escalate further.”
You won’t hear me say this often, but Donald Trump is right: Ted Cruz is a liar. Anybody who paid attention to the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol saw the violence of Trump supporters who ransacked the Capitol, leaving 140 police officers injured and multiple people dead. And anybody who was watching the B roll playing as Cruz’s lips moved could see that the demonstrations outside the homes of SCOTUS justices were peaceful. (There’s a federal statute against protesting at judges’ homes, but it’s debatable whether demonstrations in public spaces outside them violate it; it’s also worth noting that the protest outside Kavanaugh’s home in Chevy Chase was organized by his neighbors on their own property.)
Cruz and Hannity, however, weren’t about to let facts, or even their viewers’ basic perceptions of sight and sound, get in the way of their victimhood.
Remarkably (or perhaps not), the Cruz episode wasn’t the one on Monday’s Fox News primetime lineup where a Republican senator went to such desperate lengths to rewrite the history of Jan. 6 that the whole segment felt like an elaborate troll. If you’re a regular reader of this newsletter or my Twitter feed, this probably won’t send you to the fainting couch, but the sheer brazenness of the lies pushed on the network’s top-rated primetime lineup over the course of a single evening stood out as remarkable to me, and I watch this stuff all the time.
Lindsey Graham praises the hero of Jan. 6: Donald Trump
White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki responded to demonstrations outside the homes of Justices Samuel Alito and Brett Kavanaugh with a statement affirming that while that President Biden “strongly believes in the Constitutional right to protest, that should never include violence, threats, or vandalism.” The statement was criticized by progressives as overly indulgent of right-wing framing, but it didn’t go nearly far enough for Hannity or Sen. Lindsey Graham.
During his own Monday appearance on Hannity, Graham contrasted Biden’s statement unfavorably with the one Trump made on Jan. 6 calling off the insurrectionists after he’d whipped them into a lethal frenzy, and urged Biden to “do what Trump did.”
“He told them to leave the Capitol,” Graham said, referring to a recorded statement Trump tweeted out after the damage had been done in which he told “very special” rioters “we love you” and asked them to “go home in peace” even though “we had an election that was stolen from us. It was a landslide election and everyone knows it, especially the other side.” (Twitter banned Trump’s account shortly after he tweeted the video.)
Graham continued: “Well Biden, tell ‘em to leave the judges alone at all. Do what Trump did. He told them to leave. You need to tell them to leave.”
Mark Meadows’s text messages recently revealed that Trump only asked insurrectionists to go home after Republican members of Congress and Fox News hosts (including, ironically, Hannity) flooded his inbox with messages urging him to get Trump to do something, anything, to stop the violence.
Trump’s statement was widely viewed as an indefensible disgrace, at least here outside the multiverse of madness where Graham and Hannity seem to live. Even Graham himself initially made a big show out of breaking with Trump over his role in inciting the insurrection. If the term “gaslighting” applies to anything in a political context, it applies here.
That wasn’t all. Hannity offered another whopper during his monologue, telling viewers that even if Roe is overturned, “at the end of the day, abortion will be legal across the country.”
In fact, as I’ve written about elsewhere, 22 red and purple states have laws on the books that will immediately ban abortions if Roe is overturned. Graham’s fellow South Carolina Republican, state Sen. Richard Cash, proposed one in January. But Graham and Hannity, likely aware of the fact that about 70% of Americans are opposed to overturning Roe, are opting to just lie about it. …
There are plenty of valid criticisms of President Biden and Democrats, and it’s hard not to feel somewhat disappointed in the failure of their trifecta to meaningfully improve the lives of their constituents. Fairly or not, the party in control of the White House and Congress generally pays the price for that, especially in midterm elections.
But people who lie as easily and shamelessly as do the members of the Fox/GOP nexus shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near power, at least in a sane country. They’ll take away your rights, then go on TV and tell millions of viewers how Democrats are to blame for it. They’ll incite an insurrection, then accuse peaceful women’s rights protesters of threatening the republic. And these aren’t voices in the wilderness — they’re presidential hopefuls, powerful senators, and the most-watched cable “news” hosts on TV. I don’t have great answers, but I’m damn sure this is a big problem.
It’d be funny if it wasn’t so disturbing.
Aaron Rupar is an independent journalist covering US politics and media and is author of Public Notice at aaronrupar.substack.com, where an expanded version of this column can be found.
From The Progressive Populist, June 15, 2022
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