Biden and Democrats are Destroying Trumpism’s Big Lie

Aside from the big lie that the 2020election was stolen - despite no evidence whatsoever and 60 plus lost court challenges - the biggest Trump/GOP lie was that a Biden/Harris victory combined with Democrat control of both houses of Congress would unleash socialism and empower socialists and the radical left which would in turn bring on a depression.  None of that has happened and now, Biden and the Democrats are implementing widely popular programs and displaying a quiet competence at addressing many of the nation's problems, including the Covid-19 roll out.  The contrast with the Trump/Pence regime with its incompetency, positions held by hacks out of their league and the daily chaos of a bad reality TV show could not be more stark.  Most upsetting to Trump and congressional Republicans is the wide popularity of the Covid-19 relief act which Republicans made a big show of not supporting.  With many economists predicting an economic boom to come, the GOP game plan for the 2022 mid-terms could end up in tatters.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at what we are witnessing.  Here are highlights:

A funny thing is happening in U.S. politics right now. President Biden and Democratic leaders are working closely with the left on a variety of fronts, and while complications, challenges and future divisions loom, it’s all unfolding more smoothly than you might have expected.

And the political sky isn’t crashing down on Democrats’ heads. In fact, Americans appear to be concluding that things are getting better.

This wasn’t supposed to happen. The GOP’s 2020 campaign narrative — made especially poisonous by a certain former president — was that Democratic rule would run the country into the ground precisely because Democrats would prove wholly captive to their crazy socialist left flank.

Now Biden and Democratic leaders actually are working with the party’s left to a surprising and salutary degree. And that surely helps explain some of their early successes — and those successes’ popularity.

The overwhelming takeaway here is that Biden and the White House are working hard to keep things running smoothly with the party’s left. Meanwhile, Biden and Democratic leaders have largely adopted the progressive reading of the folly of chasing bipartisanship for its own sake.

In short, they are talking to the left, while largely accepting that the GOP is essentially cutting itself out of the conversation about how to address the country’s major challenges.

Take the $1.9 trillion rescue package. While some outcomes disappointed the left — the loss of the minimum wage hike — the ultimate result was the most far-reaching piece of progressive legislation in a half century. . . . Its scale and ambition, secured precisely because Democrats refused to chase GOP support, unified the party.

It’s hard to overstate how dramatically different all this is from the 2020 Trumpist/GOP narrative. The story was that a mentally deteriorating Biden would quickly become captive to the radical socialist left, and that this would drive the stupendous Trump economy (soaring after he vanquished covid) into a “depression.”

The GOP tactic of lumping together mainstream Democrats and liberals with terrifying radical elements (such as depicting civil rights liberals as tools of communism) has a long history. But Trumpism added his own special poison to the brew.

Think back to the Georgia Senate runoffs. Republicans argued that the radical left threatened to take over the Senate through the (moderate and unassuming) figures of Jon Ossoff and Raphael G. Warnock. GOP ads depicted violent, unchecked antifa mobs and non-White socialist lawmakers plotting to convert the country into a hellscape of socialist devastation.

Now go watch Ossoff on MSNBC, talking soberly about the benefits the rescue package will deliver to Georgia residents, and how this passed without any GOP support in Congress but with extraordinarily broad support among voters, including many Republican ones. Meanwhile, competent governance has vaccinations on track and may soon defeat covid-19.

A Democratic center-left alliance largely did that. And the country broadly approves, even as GOP lawmakers sat it out entirely.

All this has important implications for what’s next. Republicans are reduced to admitting we’re likely to see an economic boom while arguing it has nothing to do with Biden or Democrats.

But as Michael Grunwald points out, Trump’s prediction of a Biden depression will make that harder to pull off. That has left Republicans hoping all this spending produces inflation or that they can fearmonger about the deficits that they themselves pumped up with tax cuts for the rich and corporations.

To be clear, a lot can still go wrong. . . . . But as of now, the entire Trumpified tale we heard throughout 2020 looks to be collapsing. And ironically enough, it’s that center-left alliance that is on track to burying it.