When Donald Trump's Newly Pitched Lie Posed More Danger Than His Previous Lies

A new lie being peddled by former president Donald Trump is more threatening than those before, political analysts say. The Big Lie, as it was rapidly dubbed, was that Donald Trump had won the 2020 election. But there's a new deception in the market: Big Lie Two. The deception is that the indictments against Trump are part of a coordinated effort to prevent him from vying for president. Big Lie Two is more pernicious and harmful than Big Lie One for two reasons, political analysts assert.

Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labor, is a professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley. In a scathing opinion in The Guardian, Reich opined that the second big lie should be viewed with great caution by the US Judiciary itself.

Trump's criticism of the judiciary as biased against him is having a more nuanced impact. Trump is eroding public confidence in the criminal justice system by portraying it as politicized and corrupt and as a part of a plot to keep him from the Presidency. The US's 244-year experiment in self-government is gravely threatened if a sizable segment of the populace starts to think that the juries, judges, and prosecutors working to hold Trump responsible for his attempts to rig the 2020 election are all involved in the same fabricated scheme to prevent him from winning the presidency. As damaging as Trump's first big lie was, his second one could be for the future of American democracy and for the rest of the world that looks to the US for leadership, Reich writes.

Columnist, progressive commentator, and author Michael Tomasky fears it to be even more dangerous. On several fronts, credible evidence has surfaced suggesting that Trump may have broken the law. The evidence, or at least a substantial piece of it, is readily visible to the public, and the alleged offenses are far more serious and urgent. But still, a majority of Americans seem to think that these indictments are politically motivated, which is a dangerous precedent to set in a democracy, Tomasky writes in The New Republic. From a democratic standpoint, it is unfortunate that so many people hold beliefs that are not only false but also opposed to reality. Republicans in Congress have sided with Trump in accusing Democrats of “weaponizing” the investigations into him, even though grand juries made up of regular people are the ones conducting the investigations.

One hundred years ago, the globe saw the rise of fascist leaders who aimed to merge their identities with those of their followers while fostering mistrust toward all other establishments. This resulted in followers losing their ability to think for themselves and accepting the leaders' words as gospel, Reich wrote. Tomasky warns that if the American populace's distrust of the system triumphs over Trump's lawlessness, “we will wake up next November 6 counting our brittle democracy’s numbered days.”

Editor's note: This article was originally published on October 18, 2023. It has since been updated.