Member-only story
Tragic Sequel
Once upon a time, Trump administration senior adviser Kellyanne Conway defended White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer’s mendacious characterization of Trump’s inauguration crowd as “the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period, both in person and around the globe.” Conway told the host of NBC’s Meet the Press, Chuck Todd that “You’re saying it’s a falsehood. And they’re giving — Sean Spicer, our press secretary — gave alternative facts.”
Over the next four years, Trump and his Republican Party mobilized the Cult of Bullshit that the GOP and its galaxy of conservative mainstream and social media platforms have been building since the fall of Nixon for a full frontal assault on the landscape of American politics worthy of comparison to Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg. It’s bad enough that we already had one civil war over “states’ rights” allowing ownership of other people. Now we are engaged in a great civil war over sociopathic paranoid delusions.
“Knowing full well that he had lost the 2020 presidential election, the former president and his allies and supporters falsely claimed and proclaimed to the nation that he had won the election, and then he and they set about to overturn the election that he and they knew the former president had lost,” former federal judge J. Michael Luttig said in the opening statement of his testimony in a hearing of the House Special Committee on…