As the infamous comedienne Joan Rivers used to say, “Can we talk?”
If there is one signature legacy of the Trump political era it is the ubiquitous “fact check” article in nearly every left-leaning media outlet after a Trump speech, campaign rally, or after a day of Trump sycophants genuflecting during the Republican National Convention. Ordinarily I would be curious as to the thoughts of the now burgeoning army of fact checkers employed by the likes of CNN, New York Times, Washington Post, etc. The problem is no one cares. Trump and his legions have made such a career of lying with impunity that news of his or their lies isn’t news. A former and possible future president of the United States is such a pathological liar that a summary of his latest lies or those of his representatives is just not newsworthy. It is the norm. And his base of more than 30% of the American electorate eat it up.
If the political life of this country over the past 10 years tells us anything, facts don’t matter. The sooner the Democratic Party wakes up to this reality, the better chance they may have of not being embarrassed in November. In modern politics, message trumps facts. The Republicans under Donald Trump have had a consistent, if not fact-based, message for the last four years. Biden is not a legitimately elected president, hordes of terrorists are storming the southern border, and the billions of dollars in infrastructure spending that is boosting employment and improving roads and bridges in deep red conservative districts is all due to the parade of Republican members of Congress who voted against the Infrastructure Act, not the tenacity of a Democratic president who actually means it when he says that he will be a president for all Americans.
While it is easy to be a bit defeatist when Trump enjoys the natural boost from the wall-to-wall coverage of his party’s convention, not to mention the after-effect of his survival from an attempted assassination two days before the convention began, the reality is that the Democratic Party is losing where it matters most — messaging a consistent accessible theme that supporters can rally behind. It doesn’t matter that the cause of higher gas prices is the failure of oil companies to plan for the demand when the pandemic ended and their insatiable greed for record profits quarter after quarter. Gas prices are still higher than 2020 before the pandemic.
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Messaging is everything and facts don’t matter. I detest that I can write that with a straight face. Now that the world knows Donald Trump has doubled down on the MAGA ideology with his selection of J.D. Vance as his running mate, the Democratic message must stop hoping that 3.4% inflation, 4.0% unemployment, somewhere north of 16 million jobs created during the Biden Administration, many of them new manufacturing jobs as a result of the ChiPs Act, will sway voters to keep Trump out of the Oval Office. Voters are being fed a continual diet of the collapse of the United States as the greatest country in the world by the very people who want to continue to undermine the values that attract people here: Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms — freedom of speech and expression, freedom of worship, freedom from want, freedom from fear.
Despite Trump’s attempts to distance himself from the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, its tenets are straight from the Trump wishlist of 2015-16. He learned his lesson during his first Administration and won’t make the same mistakes. Vance is an acolyte/protégé that will do far more than Pence to further Trump’s agenda. Closer to home, state and local elections also carry huge consequences. Lt. Governor Robinson should not be given the keys to the outhouse, say nothing about the keys to the Governor’s Mansion. Women’s rights, religious freedom and a functioning meritocratic bureaucracy are at the heart of the stakes in November. It is time to start focusing on the politics as they are, not as we might wish them to be. A litany of facts about past achievements is meaningless. Messaging to counter the Republican mountain of lies and remind voters just how great this country is must take center stage.
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Brad Gutierrez, Ph.D. is a retired U.S. Air Force combat pilot, professor of Political Science, military diplomat and senior public policy civil servant. He is currently a woodworker and non-fiction writer based in Marshall.
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