People in positions of authority have tried to rewrite history to suit their purposes for as long as historical records have existed. This is especially true in authoritarian regimes, which have long seen history as a malleable propaganda tool. The pattern has become tragically familiar: dictatorial powers have used their editing pens to create myths, justify decisions, erase opponents, and even dispose of crimes.
As modern Republican politics becomes increasingly radicalized, it’s not too surprising to see the party read from a similarly despotic script. Indeed, the party has invested a considerable amount of time and effort into rewriting the parts of American history that fail to suit its purposes. Textbooks and historical details have become key elements of the GOP’s culture war crusade, as assorted partisans take aim at the events of decades and centuries ago as part of an unsettling and nationalistic attempt at historical revisionism.
What’s less appreciated is the fact that those are not the only stories from our collective history that the party has been desperate to rewrite.
Just as important as Republicans targeting events from generations past is the GOP’s war on the recent past, as the party wages frantic gaslighting campaigns to rewrite the stories that have unfolded over the last several years, molding the developments into unrecognizable new accounts.
With unnerving frequency, the contemporary Republican Party sees the recent past as an enemy to be overpowered, crushed, and conquered. It’s an effort predicated on the assumption that our memories can be bullied into submission, forced to give way to manufactured stories the GOP prefers.
To see such authoritarian tactics in American democracy as anything less than dangerous would be a mistake. The more Republicans take aim at the public’s understanding of recent events, the more dramatic the impact on everything from the public discourse to policymaking to the integrity of democracy itself.
On the surface, such mendacious campaigns have the appearance of typical, albeit brazen, dishonesty. But just below the surface, a more noxious strategy comes into focus. Leading GOP voices aren’t just lying; they’re also manufacturing narratives, hoping to replace accurate stories the party finds inconvenient, embarrassing, or both.
What’s more, many of the routine political lies that dot our landscape are not always immediately obvious. They become evident only after the fact, by way of fact-checking analysis. The war on the recent past, however, asks people to ignore what they already saw, learned, and experienced, replacing those memories with malign myths.
The motivations behind such campaigns are hardly subtle. The more recent events can be altered to fit a political agenda, the easier it becomes to present failures as triumphs and fiction as fact. What’s more, scandals and investigations can be made to disappear just as soon as a party agrees to tell its supporters that it’s been exonerated—even when the opposite is true.
This campaign of rewriting recent history is built on a foundation of pernicious pillars. The first is a wholesale indifference toward reality. If a skirmish in this conflict is going to succeed, its warriors must make a deliberate choice not to care about what the public already knows to be true or what independent fact-checkers are going to say when the dust clears.
The second is the absence of shame. Campaigns to rewrite recent history fail if those doing the rewriting express a degree of embarrassment, betraying their mendacious goals. The public will pick up on sheepishness, so Republicans who intend to replace a factual series of events with fictional ones must fully commit to the new narrative, no matter how ridiculous it is.
The third is the role of allies. No one person, no matter how powerful or politically influential, can rewrite history on his or her own. The GOP’s war on the recent past relies on a comprehensive approach, incorporating conservative media allies and like-minded partisans willing to echo the preferred, made-up story.
Indeed, it’s this point that helps separate contemporary propaganda efforts from their predecessors: Republican officials can rely on Fox News and related outlets to help disseminate their rewritten stories—quickly and efficiently, exploiting the partisan benefits of information bubbles—in ways previous parties would’ve envied.
Finally, there’s the importance of repetition. Recent history isn’t rewritten overnight. It takes a sustained effort, reinforced over time. In his 1938 book, Propaganda Boom, British author A. J. Mackenzie emphasized the importance of repetition in a successful propaganda campaign, and nearly a century later that hasn’t changed.
Taken together, a picture emerges of a Republican Party that’s grown reliant on a brute-force rhetorical strategy, taking developments that unfolded in recent memory and replacing them with a politically advantageous alternate reality.
To be sure, Crisis Management 101 is filled with familiar lessons for parties and politicians caught up in dilemmas of varying degrees of seriousness. The rhetorical ploys are tried and true: Countless actors have done their best to put a positive spin on difficult circumstances. Others have peddled dubious denials. Some have come clean while begging the electorate for forgiveness, while others still have tried to change the subject, hoping to get away with transgressions by giving the public something else to talk about.
Contemporary Republicans have launched a war on the recent past, however, for a couple of inescapable reasons. Part of the GOP’s dependence is born of uniquely indefensible circumstances: too many contemporary scandals have simply proved unspinnable. It’s one thing to try to change the subject in response to a routine controversy; it’s something else when a White House fails spectacularly to respond to a pandemic and more than a million Americans die from a dangerous contagion.
In such instances, the Crisis Management playbook sits on a shelf. It’s not enough to simply try to negate such controversies through traditional public relations tactics; it becomes necessary to overhaul the canonical understanding of what actually transpired.
GOP voices also have grown dependent on this approach because they’ve found that rewriting recent history can be incredibly effective. Rank-and-file Republican voters have been conditioned to distrust independent sources of information, and with the help of allied far-right outlets, the party now believes, with good cause, that counternarratives can become the prevailing accounts—at least among those the GOP relies on for support, money, and votes.
Such tactics have become a staple of Republican politics in the era of Donald Trump—including his final full day in the Oval Office.
Presidential farewell addresses hold a special place in the American tradition. George Washington voiced fears over factionalism in 1796, for example, and those concerns remain a staple of history classes more than two centuries later. Similarly, Dwight Eisenhower’s warnings of a “military-industrial complex” in 1961 quickly entered the nation’s political lexicon and remain highly relevant.
To the extent that Trump’s farewell address on January 19, 2021, will be remembered, it’s unlikely to be held in such high regard.
As the Republican prepared to relinquish power, the outgoing president spoke under extraordinary and historically unprecedented circumstances. A week earlier, Trump had been impeached by a bipartisan majority in the U.S. House. The week before that, an insurrectionist mob attacked the U.S. Capitol at his behest, sparking conversations among his own Cabinet members about removing Trump from office by way of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment.1
Against this backdrop, Trump delivered a twenty-minute speech in which he described a presidency that bore little resemblance to his own. It was as if his speechwriters had prepared a farewell address for someone else entirely.
Early in his remarks, the departing president called on Americans to “rise above the partisan rancor,” which seemed oddly comical given the broader context and the degree to which Trump spent his term creating a toxic political environment. But just as notably, he took the opportunity to effectively rewrite the story of his own presidency, presenting details of his supposed record that were plainly at odds with what had transpired over the previous four years.
The Republican declared with pride that he was responsible for creating “the greatest economy in the history of the world,” which wasn’t even close to being true.2 He boasted that he’d signed into law “the largest package of tax cuts” in American history, which was also plainly false.3
In the same speech, Trump claimed credit for an ambitious health care program for veterans, which had actually been created by Barack Obama years earlier.4
Perhaps most important, the outgoing president assured the American public that, thanks to his leadership, “The world respects us again.” In an apparent message for Joe Biden, the day before the Democrat’s inauguration, Trump added, “Please don’t lose that respect.”
In reality, extensive public-opinion research conducted around the globe confirmed that during Trump’s presidency, respect for and confidence in the United States had collapsed to a degree unseen since the dawn of modern polling.5
The picture the soon-to-be-former president was eager to present as he exited the White House was an obvious and demonstrable sham. Americans were treated to a farewell address in which Trump, unable to celebrate what actually transpired during his scandal-plagued term, described accomplishments that existed only in his mind.
There was a thematic symmetry to the circumstances. On his first full day as president, Trump bragged that it did not rain at his 2017 inauguration, despite the fact that the public saw attendees in raincoats getting wet.6 It stood to reason that on his last full day in office, he’d end his tenure with another don’t-believe-your-lying-eyes pitch to the public.
Listening to the remarks was, by any fair measure, a bewildering experience. But the speech was also emblematic of the larger phenomenon plaguing contemporary Republican politics.
As 2023 neared its end, national public-opinion surveys found that a majority of Republican voters believed7 that Trump made no effort to overturn the 2020 election; the former president did not keep classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago venue; the January 6 attack on the Capitol did not deserve to be seen as an insurrectionist riot; and the January 6 assault was not perpetrated by those intent on keeping Trump in power.
It’s not an accident that such an enormous chunk of the American electorate would get each of these issues so completely wrong. To grasp why so many GOP voters have gotten reality backward, it’s important to understand the strategy that left them misinformed.
The party occasionally put these narrative-reconstruction efforts to good use during the Obama era. In 2013, for example, Republicans thought they had, at long last, uncovered a legitimate scandal surrounding the Obama White House. According to the GOP’s initial narrative, the Democratic administration had been caught using the Internal Revenue Service to “target” conservatives, which was characterized as an obvious and outrageous abuse of power. Among conservatives on Capitol Hill, comparisons to Richard Nixon’s notorious Watergate scandal quickly became commonplace.
At least for a few days, the matter appeared rather serious, right up until the controversy evaporated. A closer review found that the tax agency scrutinized liberal, conservative, and nonideological groups with equal vigor, effectively ending the story.8 Every relevant allegation, including conspiracy theories about White House involvement, was thoroughly discredited.
Congressional Republicans spent the ensuing two years searching for evidence of systemic wrongdoing, but to no avail. GOP lawmakers claimed to have found instances in which some conservative groups faced tougher scrutiny from some within the IRS, but despite their best efforts, Republicans found no proof to bolster their apoplexy. Similarly, the FBI launched its own probe, and federal law enforcement didn’t uncover anything, either.9 A federal prosecutor also examined the allegations and found no lines had been crossed.10 The IRS’s inspector general’s office conducted its own investigation and came to a similar conclusion.11 The “scandal,” such as it was, proved to be a mirage.
So, Republicans rewrote the story.
In the revised version of what transpired, party leaders took the original details, scrapped the conclusion, wrote a new final chapter, and hoped the political world wouldn’t notice the difference. In the rewritten story, the original controversy remained entirely intact, and the results of the thorough investigations were simply ignored.
In 2016, for example, Representative Ron DeSantis—before he ran for Senate, governor, and later, president—launched an impeachment push targeting IRS commissioner John Koskinen, accusing him of a variety of imagined misdeeds related to the discredited scandal. The Florida Republican, not coincidentally, also used the crusade as part of a lucrative fundraising effort,12 helping DeSantis fill his campaign coffers ahead of his bids for higher office.
In the years that followed, the GOP did its best to keep the myth alive, putting its revised version of the controversy to use in 2021, as the Biden White House and Republican leaders engaged in difficult discussions over a proposed infrastructure package. Republican officials insisted that they’d oppose any compromise that asked anyone to pay more in taxes, and the Democratic president grudgingly accepted the fact that GOP lawmakers would not budge on this point. But in the interest of keeping the process moving forward, Biden instead offered an alternative: the IRS could simply better enforce the tax laws already on the books, collecting new revenues that could go toward the nation’s infrastructure needs, without raising anyone’s taxes at all.
Republicans balked at this, too. Senator John Cornyn of Texas, for example, said the party couldn’t accept such an approach because the IRS “has a reputation problem because of weaponization.” He specifically pointed to the faux scandal from 2013.13
The senator had plenty of company. When far-right groups started lobbying Congress14 against the IRS provision in the infrastructure deal, they sent a letter to senators that read in part, “No additional funding for the Internal Revenue Service, especially given its multiple scandals over the past decade.” The letter specifically claimed that the agency had “harassed conservative groups and donors,” despite reality.
A member of the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal, a reliable GOP ally, pushed the same line,15 insisting that the IRS had “unfairly singled out conservative non-profits for special scrutiny and harassment.” The opinion piece, unconcerned by the evidence, added, “It was a sobering lesson in how one of Washington’s most powerful agencies can be weaponized against political opponents.”
The claims weren’t true—effectively every aspect of the controversy had been disproven—but they had the intended effect, and improved enforcement of federal tax laws was not included in the final bipartisan infrastructure deal.
It captured one of the central problems with the GOP’s misinformation strategy: the effects aren’t philosophical, they’re practical. Republicans rewrote the essential details of an important story; the twisted version of reality took root; and it was still hindering the government’s core functions long after the truth faded from the front pages.
A year later, in the wake of the 2022 midterm elections, House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy struggled to an excruciating degree to secure the votes he needed from his own party to become House speaker. Hoping to impress the Republican conference, McCarthy unveiled a blueprint highlighting the kind of investigations he’d help launch in the next Congress if he were put in charge of the chamber.16
Halfway through the list was a predictable reference to the Internal Revenue Service. “The Democrats have politicized the IRS at every turn,” the future House speaker wrote, pointing to developments that never actually occurred. McCarthy added, as if on cue, that Obama administration officials, nearly a full decade earlier, “intentionally targeted conservative leaning non-profit organizations in an attempt to silence political speech they disagreed with.”
The fact that this hadn’t happened was beside the point, since the myth had become a touchstone on the political right. The GOP leader was eager to find common cause with his party’s far-right members, while demonstrating a commitment to their favorite legends. Naturally, McCarthy turned to one of the stories Republicans had worked so hard to rewrite.
There was no great mystery as to why this was such a priority for the party and its allies: The GOP is an avowed antitax party that sees political utility in demonizing the government agency responsible for collecting tax revenue. Any myth villainizing the IRS remained potent, so its leaders put it to use.
At that point, the established pattern kicked in. Republicans took an existing story—at least initially, there were some legitimate questions about how the IRS treated groups seeking tax-exempt status—and decided to brush aside the inconvenient factual details or the results of multiple investigations. The party proceeded to shamelessly pretend that its version of the scandal was real, relied on like-minded allies to help undermine the facts that the public might remember, and repeated the revised story ad nauseam.
Years later, it’s become an article of faith in GOP circles that the IRS was caught red-handed discriminating against mistreated conservative victims, reality be damned.
But while Americans saw battles like these in the war on the recent past during Obama’s presidency, it was Trump who took the conflict to unsettling depths, leaning on the ploy throughout his term in the hopes that rewriting stories would help get him out of assorted messes he’d created for himself.
In the wake of his election victory in 2016, for example, Trump was annoyed by the results of the popular vote, which he handily lost. The electoral college results dictated the outcome, but the fact remained that when American voters were given a choice between him and Hillary Clinton, the former Democratic secretary of state finished with nearly 3 million more votes than her GOP rival.
Uncomfortable with such details, Trump rewrote the story. Despite the unambiguous results that the public was well aware of, just weeks after Election Day, the president-elect used social media to deride what he characterized as the “so-called popular vote,”17 which Trump said he secretly won by way of evidence he could never produce.
It was deeply strange for a winning candidate to publicly question the reliability of an election that he’d won, but Trump kept adding delusional chapters to his revised story, indifferent to the fact that the vast majority of observers already knew the truth. On his fourth day in office, the Republican hosted a White House event with congressional leaders from both parties and both chambers, at which point he needlessly relitigated the race he’d won a few months earlier, insisting that “illegals”—a slur used by the right to refer to undocumented immigrants—deprived him of a victory in the popular vote by casting several million improper ballots.18
The claim was preposterous, as the president’s own lawyers conceded in a court filing during the postelection transition period.19 But the true story—Clinton won the popular vote by a comfortable margin—embarrassed Trump, so he kept facts that were plainly true at arm’s length while simultaneously making up new ones.
In fact, when Democratic leaders at the White House meeting gently reminded the president of what had actually happened, Trump presented lawmakers with what he characterized as credible evidence:20 A professional golfer named Bernhard Langer, according to the president, told him that he was in line to vote at a polling place in Florida but was denied a ballot. According to the same strange story, Langer added that he saw others he suspected were noncitizens who were permitted to cast provisional ballots.
According to a New York Times report, the anecdote was “greeted with silence, and Mr. Trump was prodded to change the subject by Reince Priebus, the White House chief of staff.” (The golfer is a German citizen who can’t vote in the United States. Langer’s daughter denied that her father and the Republican were friends.21)
The gathering came just two days after Trump—not quite twenty-four hours into his presidency—personally called the head of the National Park Service and directed him to produce flattering evidence regarding the size of the crowd at his inauguration.22 The Republican, mortified by the paltry turnout for his swearing-in ceremony, saw the story of his audience as another tale in need of a tweak.
After Park Service officials sent additional photographs that confirmed reality and challenged the president’s assumptions, Trump deployed the White House press secretary, Sean Spicer, to the briefing room to tell reporters, “This was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration—period.”23
The rhetoric was as ludicrous as it was unnecessary.24 While some of the Republican’s whoppers required some research and analysis before being exposed as lies, this was an instance in which cameras, just two days earlier, captured the modest crowds and empty bleachers along the Pennsylvania Avenue parade route. There was no point in telling Americans they didn’t see what they thought they saw.
In the war on the recent past, Spicer proved to be a discomfited field general: after leaving his White House post, the former presidential spokesperson told NPR that he wished he could get “a do-over” on the comments.25
While Spicer’s rhetoric became the stuff of late-night punch lines, far less amusing was Trump’s willingness to try to rewrite the events in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017. After a white nationalist event turned deadly—a self-proclaimed neo-Nazi used his car to murder thirty-two-year-old Heather Heyer and injure dozens of other counterprotesters—the Republican president condemned26 the “egregious display of hatred, bigotry, and violence—on many sides, on many sides.”
The rhetoric suggested that Trump was not only eager to avoid criticizing racists directly, he also saw a moral equivalence between white supremacists and their opponents, as if both were equally culpable for what transpired. Facing an avalanche of angry responses, the president managed to dig deeper a couple of days later, responding to the pushback by defending some of the racist activists, telling reporters, “Not all of those people were neo-Nazis, believe me. Not all of those people were white supremacists by any stretch.”
Trump concluded that there were “very fine people on both sides.”27
As the Republican’s rhetoric became notorious, the president again took aim at the events in the hopes of relitigating his own scandalous comments. “If you look at what I said, you will see that that question was answered perfectly,” he told reporters.28 “I was talking about people that went [to Charlottesville] because they felt very strongly about the monument to Robert E. Lee, a great general. Whether you like it or not, he was one of the great generals. I have spoken to many generals here, right at the White House, and many people thought—of the generals, they think that he was maybe their favorite general.”
Trump concluded, “People were there protesting the taking down of the monument of Robert E. Lee. Everybody knows that.”
What “everybody” actually knew was something altogether different. The Republican wasn’t simply defending fans of a Robert E. Lee statue: the “very fine people” whom Trump was eager to support were the same people chanting, among other things, “Jews will not replace us” and “Blood and soil.”29
Trump’s motivation for trying to amend his own record was entirely straightforward: his rhetoric about events in Charlottesville proved to be one of the bigger fiascos of his first year in office. Former allies abandoned the Republican in the aftermath of the controversy—there was an exodus of private-sector leaders who resigned from White House boards,30 no longer wanting to be associated with Trump—and the scandal even affected his private-sector enterprise, as the president’s glorified country club at Mar-a-Lago faced cancellations31 fueled by his “very fine people” rhetoric.
But the reasoning behind the rewrite didn’t make the public relations effort any less offensive. The gut-wrenching violence in Charlottesville jolted the nation, and Heyer’s death was a tragedy felt far and wide. It was a moment that called for an empathic leader to step up, prioritize national unity and respect for diversity, and at least try to advance the cause of healing. Trump did the opposite, not only by rewriting the story of his role, but also by doing so in a way that enflamed the situation and lent tacit support to extremists.
The GOP’s focus on the events of generations past has become a staple of contemporary Republican politics. Literally the day before Election Day 2020, for example, Trump signed an executive order establishing what the White House described as the “1776 Commission.”32 Explaining its value, the president said the initiative would help “clear away the twisted web of lies in our schools and classrooms,” adding that versions of history at odds with conservatives’ values constituted “a form of child abuse.”33
His executive order added, “Despite the virtues and accomplishments of this Nation, many students are now taught in school to hate their own country, and to believe that the men and women who built it were not heroes, but rather villains.”
The commission featured no professional historians, and it showed. On Trump’s last full day as president, the White House panel released an inconsequential forty-five-page report—the document, among other things, endorsed a far-right vision that blamed historical ills on the left, while warning the public about the perils of a so-called administrative state34—that was widely panned by qualified scholars.
James Grossman, the executive director of the American Historical Association, described the commission’s findings as a work of “cynical politics,” adding, “This report skillfully weaves together myths, distortions, deliberate silences, and both blatant and subtle misreading of evidence to create a narrative and an argument that few respectable professional historians, even across a wide interpretive spectrum, would consider plausible, never mind convincing.”35
Grossman went on to say, in reference to the Republican endeavor, “They’re using something they call history to stoke culture wars.”
It was hardly an isolated incident. Two years later, Florida’s state Board of Education approved new African American history standards that said students should learn that slaves in the United States “developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”36
The suggestion that some Black people benefited from slavery—as if there are upsides to crimes against humanity—sparked an immediate and unavoidable outcry, though it wasn’t the only odious element in the standards. Kevin Kruse, a history professor at Princeton University, wrote a related analysis,37 highlighting several elements of the standards that reflected “the clumsy influence of partisan politics.”
Kruse found that members of the state Board of Education—handpicked by Ron DeSantis, whose GOP presidential campaign struggled to address the debacle—approved history standards that needlessly elevated conservative and Republican figures while simultaneously referencing a civil rights law that doesn’t exist.
Board members defended the standards by pointing to sixteen individuals who, they claimed, developed valuable skills while enslaved. The New York Times’ Jamelle Bouie explained soon after that the rejoinder was roughly as flawed as the standards themselves: “Several of the people cited weren’t ever enslaved, and there’s little evidence that those who were learned any relevant skills for their ‘personal benefit’ in slavery.”38
The uproar coincided with revelations that DeSantis’s administration also approved materials created by an outfit called PragerU, a nonprofit organization cofounded by a conservative radio host. A Tampa Bay Times investigation concluded, “The content—some of which is narrated by conservative personalities such as Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson—features cartoons, five-minute video history lessons and story-time shows for young children and is part of a brand called PragerU Kids. And the lessons share a common message: Being pro-American means aligning oneself to mainstream conservative talking points.”39
The uncomfortable fact remains, however, that while rewriting the history of generations past is menacing, Republicans and their allies have also found it relatively easy. Most people are not scholars. They do not have history degrees. Their understanding of people and events that predate their lifetimes is susceptible to manipulation.
One of the PragerU videos, for example, featured an animated Booker T. Washington distorting the history of the Civil War, including a voice actor saying things the iconic educator never said and endorsing ideas belied by Washington’s genuine vision.40 A typical person might not immediately recognize the flaws in the content, and many students being presented the information in a school setting would likely believe it.
Rewriting events from the recent past, however, requires a different kind of audacity and ambition. At issue are events most Americans saw and remember. These aren’t subjects of debate for historical symposiums, or obscure developments that an average person might have a superficial understanding of. Rather, at issue are events from the last few years that people lived through and experienced firsthand.
Republicans have nevertheless taken on the bold challenge of convincing people that their eyes have deceived them; their memories are wrong; independent sources of information are not to be trusted; and partisan changes to the recent past deserve to be embraced without question.
It reflects a radical vision that Trump and his allies have imposed on Republican politics. This is, after all, the party of “alternative facts.”41 And “polls are fake, just like everything else.”42 “Truth isn’t truth.”43 “Over time, facts develop”44 and its rhetorical cousin, facts “are in the eye of the beholder.”45
The point is not that the Democratic Party is filled exclusively with angels who would never dare to consider putting a misleading spin on mortifying missteps. Most fair-minded observers know better. But the qualitative difference between the parties is unavoidable. It didn’t occur to Obama and his White House team to tell the public that the Affordable Care Act’s website worked flawlessly from the start, and anyone who says otherwise is promoting a lie. It also didn’t occur to Hillary Clinton to launch a mind-numbing crusade based on the idea that she’d secretly won the electoral college vote in 2016, pointing to evidence of systemic fraud that existed only in her mind.
Such mendacity would’ve immediately been recognized as outlandish, which was why the party and its leaders saw no value in even trying to peddle such absurdities. In GOP politics, however, there are no comparable reservations.
As Trump’s first year in the White House neared an end, Billy Bush, to whom the Republican bragged about assaulting women during the infamous Access Hollywood recording,46 wrote an opinion piece for the New York Times explaining what he’d learned about the president.
After noting that he’d confronted Trump about inflating the ratings of his reality-television program, The Apprentice, Bush wrote that Trump had told him privately, “People will just believe you. You just tell them, and they believe you.”47
Years later, the Republican and his party adopted an eerily similar approach to describing the details of key events from our collective recent history, based in part on the expectation that Americans “will just believe” them.
It’s a vision that has come to define the former president’s approach to communicating with the public. In the summer of 2023, Trump used his social media platform to declare with enthusiasm, “With time, people forget!”48 What might have seemed like a complaint was better seen as a problem that Trump and his party have been eager to exploit in dangerous ways.
When George Orwell wrote 1984 in the aftermath of World War II, the hero of his novel, Winston Smith, works for the ruling party’s propaganda arm. It was called the Ministry of Truth, and it was responsible for, among other things, rewriting history. Among the lessons Smith was told to embrace was the notion that “the past was alterable.”
It’s a principle the former president and his party have embraced with unnerving enthusiasm.
This book is not intended as a comprehensive review of American politics from the last several years. What’s more, many of the underlying events are themselves familiar—the January 6 attack, the federal response to the Covid pandemic, Trump’s impeachments, et al.—and those stories won’t be retold in granular detail here.
Rather, the book is intended as a lens through which to see GOP misinformation campaigns, contextualizing partisan efforts that were, and are, intended to convince people they do not remember the events Republicans would prefer they forget.
The point is to shine a spotlight on how the Republican Party has tried to rewrite our recent history, why the GOP has grown so dependent on the tactic, the degree to which the partisan campaigns have succeeded, and the consequences of the party’s alternative narratives challenging reality.
“All authoritarian movements know the power of historical myths,” the Washington Post’s Max Boot wrote in early 2021.49 “That’s why they go to such great lengths to rewrite the past to justify their rule. . . . The Republican Party, as it becomes increasingly anti-democratic, is no different. It is busy reshaping both the distant past and the more recent past to its liking.”
The stakes couldn’t be much higher: The foundation of democracy rests in large part on a shared understanding of current events. When that understanding is deliberately corrupted by brazen partisans, the consequences can be dire.
The more Republicans attack the recent past, the more a larger political crime comes into view: the party increasingly sees the tools that the electorate relies on to make sound decisions—facts, memories, records, an ability to apply lessons learned—as little more than annoyances to be discarded. To allow the GOP to succeed is to tolerate an offensive that’s pushing our political system to the breaking point.