Next stop, Hell A couple of lines rattle around behind my eyes this morning. “The Last Days of Pompeii” is one. Another is “Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.” “The Trump people are living in a bubble and it’s affecting their ability to understand the world around them,” Digby wrote yesterday, reacting in part to this passage from Anne Applebaum: Europeans can also see that this alternative reality is directly and profoundly shaped by Russian propaganda. I don’t know whether the American president absorbs Russian narratives online, from proxies, or from Putin himself. Either way, he has thoroughly adopted the Russian view of the world, as has Vance. They’ve gone down a rabbit hole and mean to take the country and the world with it. The Russians are certainly playing Trump and his circle, but there’s more to it. Republicans as a party have habituated themselves to lying and to living inside the bubble of lies they tell. This tendency predates the rise of Trumpism. We might trace it to Newt Gingrich’s cynical strategies of the 1990s like his “Language: A Key Mechanism of Control.” Or to their drilling it into their voters’ heads starting decades earlier that large numbers of, you know, THEM, were voting improperly, or illegally, or most importantly, not for Republicans. Evidence was irrelevant. It became an article of faith, and lying a habit of mind. The Republican Party has come unstuck in reality Synthesizing Roy Cohn’s three rules about power and Norman Vincent Peale’s…