Explaining the Right is a weekly series that looks at what the right wing is currently obsessing over, how it influences politics—and why you need to know.
This past week, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt blatantly lied while defending President Donald Trump’s terrible economic performance.
“Every economic metric does in fact show that the economy is improving,” she said Thursday.
This is not a hard fact to check. Unemployment is up, prices are up, and affordability continues to plague U.S. consumers as they deal with the fallout from Trump’s idiotic tariffs.
Leavitt’s lazy lie isn’t an aberration. Trump and his administration lie with abandon, not about obscure topics that require expertise to debunk, but about simple issues that anyone can easily understand.
For instance, Trump said Monday that he never said that he would release video of U.S. missile strikes on boats in South America. But just a few days before, Trump said that releasing the video would be “no problem.”
Or take Trump’s ever-escalating number of wars that he claims to have stopped since taking office. You don’t have to be an expert in geopolitics to understand this is bogus.
As Trump’s team whips up lie after lie, he continues to claim that everyone else is lying, particularly when he is fact checked. But Trump’s aversion to the truth with easily dispelled whoppers is not new for the GOP.
In the mid-2000s, as the Iraq War descended into a bloody quagmire, former President George W. Bush repeatedly insisted that his administration would “stay the course.”
But then in October 2006, ahead of midterm elections where Democrats would clobber the GOP and take control of Congress, Bush told ABC News, “We’ve never been ‘stay the course.’”
As multiple video montages of the moment have shown, this was a blatant lie that anyone could easily see.
In addition to politicians simply lying to advance their agendas, the Republican habit of putting out bad lies is a product of the toxic conservative media environment.
While leftists walk on eggshells, concerned that even telling the truth will result in being slammed by the mainstream media for telling a lie, the right has created a world of its own where instant lies are currency.
The point of right-wing media, especially at Fox News, is to prop up the Republican Party—not reality. Trump’s presidency has been a mess, even by the bar he set for himself during the 2024 election. But according to Fox, it has been a great success.
That isn’t the kind of venue that’s going to debunk a statement like Leavitt’s or acknowledge the reality that Trump is far more likely to start a new war than prevent one.
Related | 29 times Fox News made us cringe in disgust this year
At the same time, the mainstream outlets that come under attack from Republicans when they do get a story right are still far more likely to carry the right’s water. When a dangerous lie gets downgraded to a competing claim, why would a Republican bother to tell the truth?
This environment rewards the lie more than it fosters a creative lie. Republicans push obvious falsehoods because there’s little to no incentive to come up with something plausible. That’s how staying the course in Iraq morphs into never being “stay the course,” and it’s how “every economic metric” is purportedly positive while Americans struggle to afford food.
For decades, it has been clear that Republicans don’t care about the truth. But they also don’t care enough to come up with good lies.
Oliver Willis
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