The Lies Are Killing Us

Created
Tue, 08/10/2024 - 03:00
Updated
Tue, 08/10/2024 - 03:00
I happened to spend some time with a highly intelligent 17 year old over the weekend who’s taking AP Government and is keenly interested in the election. She’s following all the polling and the punditry and knows the ins and out of the battleground map better than most adults I talk to. And she said something that struck me because I hadn’t really considered it before. We were talking about the VP debate and she found it odd that it was so civil. She kept waiting for something to happen. And I realized that there are millions of people for whom Trump’s brand of demagogic politics is normal. They are either young like this person and have literally grown up in this era of bad feelings or they are those for whom politics wasn’t of interest until Trump came along. That’s a lot of people who don’t know that it isn’t supposed to be this way. Granted we have had more spirited arguments in televised political debates than the one we witnessed last week between JD Vance and Tim Walz. But we never had the kind of debates like those that Donald Trump has participated in since 2016. It’ also true that we never had election campaigns like Donald Trump’s presidential campaigns and we certainly never had a presidency like his. You have to wonder, is this going to be the way it is going forward even after he’s gone? It’s hard to imagine that it will be exactly the…