The (Other) Big Lie

There are a lot of Big Lies to keep track of these days. Most Americans currently use the term to refer to Donald Trump’s lie that the 2020 election was rigged or that he won. That was the lie that sent more than 400 people to jail and led millions to support him as their true shadow president across the last four years.

But there’s another, even bigger big lie that Trump has been telling for far longer, and it’s inherent in every aspect of Trumpism. This lie consists of two key elements: that real Americans are in danger from minority groups, and that Trump will end the fear and anxiety that his supporters feel.

At root, his supporters understand that he won’t and can’t deliver on his policies in a definitive way. He will not be able to remove all undocumented people from the United States. He will not be able to end abortion completely. He cannot stop people from being trans.

But his voters understand that he’s willing to do real damage in the attempt. He will be their reactionary champion and unleash mayhem, prioritizing the resentments of his followers—even if his policies will also wreck their lives or the economy (see repealing Obamacare or twenty percent tariffs).

Along with the tax cuts his wealthiest supporters expect, the key demand from his voters at every income level is that he punish the groups he has portrayed as threats to their way of life. The devotion of Trump followers comes from their belief that, if elected, he will work to subjugate groups they see as unjustly allowed to compete with them.

What his followers agree to do in exchange is to accept each small lie he tells and never waver in their support. They know very well the outrageous things he says are false. But they will never admit it.

His promise is that they will all live comfortably inside the Big Lie together. The mutual dissembling of the candidate and his followers is obvious, yet news outlets pretend that one or both are sincere.

The white whale: mass deportation

Trump cannot actually deport the 20 million or more people he has been threatening with mass expulsion. It would mean effectively recreating the deportations and detention of the entire population of the Soviet Gulag across more than twenty years in the space of one presidential administration.

The country does not have the systems in place to carry out that mission in any coherent way. Yet Trump’s catastrophic attempt to do it would tank the U.S. economy and devastate multiple industries, as well as tearing apart the families of many U.S. citizens.

But it will not matter to is voters that the effort is botched. What his followers want to see is harm to immigrants themselves. They want to feel prioritized by seeing others demeaned.

Countless senior writers and editors in U.S. media are unable or refuse to accept this truth. In the Atlantic, George Packer wrote this week that he was most persuaded by the arguments that in 2016 “the leading determinant of support for Trump was residence in a declining what community that had recently seen the arrival of nonwhite immigrants, which brought rapid cultural change and created a sense that the country was becoming unrecognizable.”

He somehow framed this reaction as not being about race—or at least not centrally so, which seems ridiculous on its face. But the more important point to make about his declaration is that it’s not even true.

According to UCLA’s Latino Policy and Politics Institute, actual research into who voted for Trump in 2016 showed clearly that support for Trump was strongest in the communities where immigration was low. The actual situation on the ground in 2016 was so much the opposite of what Packer is claiming (and assertions that Trump himself has made) that it has a name: The Trump Paradox.

Report author Raúl Hinojosa-Ojeda found that “support for Trump was highest in counties with the lowest exposure to immigration and trade, but which had the strongest anti-immigrant and antitrade attitudes.” Racism and bigotry eclipsed any real-life experience of suffering as a result of immigration.

Of course it’s possible to find, as Packer did, some people with that attitude in Charleroi, Pennsylvania—where real immigrants have in fact arrived. But Trump’s strongest support comes from those who aren’t even dealing with the strain on social services or housing that an influx of immigrants can bring, even when they are revitalizing a town in decline.

Researchers found the effects of the Trump Paradox were even more pronounced in 2020. Trump base does not suffer primarily from economic anxiety, though there’s plenty of that in some red regions of the country. It’s cultural resentment layered under or over racism.

The cat-lady problem

But Trump is not just about stoking racism and ethnic bigotries. He’s also indulging a profound desire among his followers to put women in their place by refusing them control over their bodies, by surveilling them and charging them for alleged wrongdoing in connection with pregnancy.

History has taught us that banning abortions doesn’t work. And just as expected, after the Dobbs ruling that overturned Roe v. Wade and took away women’s national abortion protections, the number of procedures went up nationwide.

In addition, more infants died in 2023 as a result of the Supreme Court decision to strip women of their rights. The political face of the abortion issue is not about protecting women or children—which is obvious in comments from vice presidential candidate JD Vance’s comments about childless cat ladies running the country, describing adults without children as “more sociopathic.”

When elected officials in his party or key financial backers to his campaign ban IVF treatments, refuse to guarantee access to contraception, and even seem to question women’s suffrage—it’s clear that the Trump coalition believes women, along with other historically marginalized groups, have been given too much independence.

This line of thought can be seen in the dark sludge emerging from Tucker Carlson’s brain this week at a Trump rally in Georgia, as he channeled the id of Trump supporters, imagining a future in which Trump regains the presidency but also somehow has a 15-year-old misbehaving Democratic daughter he’s going to punish, for the good of America: “Dad comes home! And he’s pissed... You’ve been a bad little girl, and you’re getting a vigorous spanking, right now.”

In a related vein, a strange new piece in Politico framed young white men’s support for Trump as due to their being tired of efforts at broader inclusion and feeling that opportunities for advancement are structured to favor women. No actual assessment of the truth of any of these assumptions is made. The reporter avoids establishing whether the young men’s resentment and perception have any basis in reality with the observation that “while politics is often about justice, it’s also about feelings…”

For the journalists who frame their articles this way, the issue is not the many examples of authoritarian language and threats against women, which have been turned into policies that have led to physical harm and even death. Trump supporters’ wounded feelings hold more value than actual injuries to women.

The list of small lies that add up to the big one is endless. In these last days before the election, ads fanning the moral panic around trans issues—which affect a miniscule part of the population and most voters not at all—have received more than $65 million in advertising buys by Trump and other Republicans. Those ads portray a powerless group in society as a significant threat to the American way of life.

All these lies have in common is pushing the idea that true Americans will triumph by targeting and punishing the right people. As the results of the American National Election Studies found, this was a key determinant of who voted for Trump in 2016.

“Voters who wanted domineering leaders to crush evil and get rid of rotten apples supported Trump at every age and stage, at every level of education and income,” wrote researchers David Smith and Eric Hanley about the results of Trump’s first race for the presidency. “Only a few other ANES items divided Trump voters from Clinton voters as significantly and reliably—mainly, statements expressing resentment towards women, minorities, immigrants, and Muslims.”

We have known these truths for eight years now, yet too many insist on trying to see the Trump phenomenon as something other than what it is. Many key large news outlets continue to live their own big lie.

But Trump’s followers know what’s happening. Trump is the one who will coddle them and create a fantasy world where they regain the status they feel they’ve lost, if only by endangering the most vulnerable among us and forcing us all to live with the consequences of their bigotry.

Though they know he’s lying to them, they don’t actually care about the policy implications of his platform. They imagine he will be there for them, that he is dedicated to their restoration.

In this arena, too, they are fooling themselves, because he loathes his followers to the same degree that he is dependent on them to stay out of jail. They’re the suckers for every new scam he uses to profit off them, as he acquires both more power and more money at their expense.

What’s more, their anxiety, falsely stoked, cannot be assuaged, because the world has already changed in ways they refuse to acknowledge. The Big Lie is that the world can be transformed to preserve Trump’s supporters from having to reckon with their place in it. All the candidate and his voters can offer each other is mutual delusion. Journalists and the rest of the public, however, do not have to go along with it.