Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans’ War on the Recent Past

The Republican Party is waging a “frantic gaslighting campaign” to “rewrite the stories that have unfolded over the last several years,” according to this illuminating account from Benen (The Impostors), a producer of The Rachel Maddow Show. Pointing to polls showing that “a majority of Republican voters [believe] that Trump made no effort to overturn the 2020 election,” among other misbeliefs that absolve Donald Trump from wrongdoing and exaggerate his successes as president, Benen delves into how the Republican playbook of “historical revisionism” has evolved in recent years to make such lies possible to perpetuate. While much of it comes down to Trump’s habitual lying and self-aggrandizing being repeated as fact on right-leaning outlets like Fox News, Benen also spotlights Republican politicians who have entered Trump’s alternate reality and begun generating their own pro-Trump spin, like Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson, who claimed the Jan. 6 insurrectionists were “fake Trump protesters,” and New York congresswoman Elise Stefanik, who asserted that the FBI’s search for classified documents at Mar-a-Lago was part of a “hoax.” While Benen, true to form, spends slightly too much time on Russia-related events, his account is well sourced and covers a lot of ground. This cogent survey of the Trumpist lie factory is worth checking out for more than just fans of Maddow. (Aug.)