As Ron DeSantis begins his White House run, the GOP’s war on the truth kicks into overdrive
If the Florida governor or any of his competitors hope to win the Republican nomination, they must do more than defeat the other candidates. They must also defeat the truth.
When Ron DeSantis announced his presidential campaign via Twitter Spaces this week, it should have given the Florida governor a bigger platform from which to push lies.
However, as glitches and other technical issues delayed his announcement by nearly 30 minutes, costing him hundreds of thousands of viewers in the process, the truth of the moment was evident. DeSantis can sign statutes that allow schools to hide America’s racism. He can create a police force designed to suppress the vote. He can use the levers of government to engage in a culture war with Disney. But try as he might, DeSantis cannot ban the truth.
That’s what makes this Republican presidential primary election so different. Truth itself is on the ballot, and if DeSantis or any of his competitors hope to win the GOP nomination, they must do more than defeat the other candidates. They must also defeat the truth.
The fight against truth didn’t start with DeSantis. It began when Donald Trump won the presidency after years of repeating the racist lie that former President Barack Obama was born in Kenya. Trump went on to make 30,573 false or misleading statements over the course of his presidency.
Though Trump is facing numerous criminal and civil investigations, others are paying the price for acting on Trump’s prevarication, including Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes. He was sentenced to 18 years in prison for his role in planning and executing the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection that began with Trump’s lie about winning the 2020 election. As for Trump, the lies seem to have raised his political stock. He is the front-runner for the GOP presidential nomination.
If they hope to erode his lead, Trump’s Republican rivals must embrace at least some of his lies. Some parrot the ridiculous notion that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. Others pretend that criminal investigations of Trump are a witch hunt. Still others, like U.S. Sen. Tim Scott, claim that racism is a thing of the past.
Sen. Scott, who announced his presidential campaign a few days before DeSantis, is the first African American to be elected to Congress from South Carolina since Reconstruction. During a 2016 speech, he recounted some of his own experiences with racism. Speaking from the Senate floor, Scott said he had been stopped by the police seven times in one year, mostly for driving a new car in the wrong neighborhood.
“I simply ask you this,” Scott told his Senate colleagues at the time. “Recognize that just because you do not feel the pain, the anguish of another, does not mean it does not exist.”
Yet, in his quest to become president, Scott now claims that America is not a racist country. That’s not only a lie. It’s a lie that Scott can refute through his own lived experience.
Then there’s former Vice President Mike Pence, who was trapped in the U.S. Capitol with his family on Jan. 6 as Trump sent tweets targeting him. Pence wrote a memoir that largely praised Trump’s presidency, but his criticism of Trump’s actions around Jan. 6 has been muted, and a judge had to order Pence to testify about conversations he had with Trump in the run-up to the insurrection.
If Pence, who has hinted that he might run for president, won’t tell the complete story, he’s engaging in half-truths. And in the words of my grandmother, a half-truth is a whole lie.
That brings me back to DeSantis. He is, perhaps, the most dangerous liar of them all, because DeSantis, as governor of Florida, can control what children learn. In doing so, he can create a generation of people for whom lies are the foundation of their very being.
If you can train children to believe that racism is a figment of our imagination, that diversity is an evil to be vanquished, and that knowledge is a luxury we can’t afford, then you create generations of ignorance.
If that is the agenda DeSantis wants to bring to the White House, he is not running against political opponents. He is running against truth, and that is a battle I pray he will eventually lose.