Politicians have been lying since the dawn of our formerly vibrant democracy.

Random examples abound. John Adams and his pamphleteering surrogates said that Thomas Jefferson if elected would shut down all the churches. JFK tried to pump up his anti-Soviet credentials by inveighing against a Republican-created “missile gap” that in truth did not exist. Bill Clinton said, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky.”

But nothing in our history can compete with the industrial-strength lies that emanate with fascistic discipline from the mouths of the cultists who’ve already degraded our public discourse to an unprecedented degree. Steve Bannon said a few years ago that the goal was “to flood the zone with s–,” to the point where the average Joe is clueless to discern what’s true. Now it’s part of our daily diet.

Exhibit A, at this very moment, is the mendacious MAGA mantra about the government shutdown. The new Big Lie goes like this: Democrats shut down the government because they “want to give free health care to illegal aliens.”

Trump went a step further, naturally, by reposting a fake AI appearance in which a fake Chuck Schumer made this fake statement: “If we give all these illegal aliens free health care, we might be able to get them on our side so they can vote for us.”

To paraphrase what the writer Mary McCarthy once said about writer-rival Lillian Hellman, every word MAGA utters is a lie, including and and the.

It requires five seconds of cognitive thought to realize how brazenly stupid the lie really is. What political party, except one bent on committing political suicide, would ever propose spending billions of taxpayers’ money on giving free health care to millions of undocumented immigrants – and shutting down the government (thus imperiling many federal services and federal workers’ jobs) in a bid to advance such a scheme?

Besides, it couldn’t happen anyway because it’s illegal – and the Democratic party alone still respects and hews to the rule of law. Undocumented people are expressly prohibited by law from signing up for federally-financed health insurance. They can’t get Medicaid. They can’t sign up for Obamacare coverage. They can’t sign up for Medicare. They can’t sign up for the Children’s Health Insurance Program. And not a single syllable in the Democrats’ budget plan even hints that the millions of undocumented people should be granted eligibility for any federal health care.

Brazen lying that stokes hatred of immigrants – and ties Democrats to those immigrants – is diabolically brilliant. The MAGA cultists may not realize (because their knowledge of history is at best shaky) that they are veritable disciples of Vladimir Lenin, who said more than a century ago that political rhetoric should be “calculated to evoke hatred, aversion and contempt…of such a nature as to evoke the worst thoughts, the worst suspicions about the opponent.”

Right now there’s also an ancillary Big Lie, as articulated by deputy despot Vance: “If you’re an American citizen and you’ve been to the hospital in the last few years, you’ve probably noticed that wait times are especially large and very often somebody who’s there in the emergency room, waiting, is an illegal alien, very often it’s a person who can’t speak English. Why do those people get healthcare benefits at hospitals paid for by American citizens? The answer is a decision made by the Biden administration.”

But in truth – for what that’s worth – Biden made no such decision. Under longstanding federal law, hospital ERs are required to help everybody in need, and a tiny portion of Medicaid spending – .4 percent in 2023 – picks up the ER tabs. That 1986 law was signed by a wacko deep-state commie named Ronald Reagan.

Why do the MAGA leaders lie so shamelessly? Because it works. Emotions trump facts; the gut trumps the brain. When the convicted felon lied a year ago that Haitians were eating pets in Ohio, his dearth of veracity was irrelevant. He’d tapped into the rampant anti-immigrant racism; empirical details didn’t matter. His crew is pulling the same con now.

Democrats have long been notoriously bad at refuting MAGA’s lies. In our post-truth dystopia, millions of Americans – the deluded and the credulous – have forfeited critical thinking and pledged allegiance to their own Jim Jones. Facts are strictly for the “libs”; what they crave is his anger. Unlike the stony-faced military brass, they swallow whatever he says, and they’re happy to drink his Cruel-Aid.

Which is worrisome, and compels me to quote Voltaire: “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”

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Copyright 2025 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes the Subject to Change newsletter. Email him at [email protected]