Republicans love a lie. George Santos just wasn't telling the right ones.
, there was often a method to the madness. Trump’s most powerful lies exploited underlying beliefs that his base already had.
Consider the two biggest lies that bookend Trump’s rise and his fall: the racist birther lie that Barack Obama wasn’t born in the U.S., and the lie that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump. There is no evidence to support either claim, and there’s plenty of evidence that clearly contradicts them. But the lies got traction and traveled because Trump was tapping into latent belief systems that existed among his base.
Exploitation of bias also helps explain how Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia has survived in Congress despite her affiliation with lies that are even more outlandish than Trump's. Her theories thatare bigoted and preposterous. But since the claims slot into the contours of white nationalist belief systems — Jews"control" the world; climate change is a hoax — they don’t necessarily elicit the kind of reaction that Santos is getting from some on the right.
None of this is to equate Santos’ lies to those of some of his GOP colleagues or to say that one kind is more morally or intellectually defensible. But the swirl of controversy around Santos reveals how the most effective lies on the right involve exploiting mistrust of The Other. Instead of projecting lies that fuel the political base he’s courting, Santos has only drawn scrutiny to himself.
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