Republicans are eagerly pushing three wildly unpopular ideas with a certainty that boggles the mind.
President Donald Trump started off the week by asserting that the shooting incident during the White House Correspondents’ Dinner validated his demands for the construction of a gaudy ballroom at the White House. These demands were soon backed up by congressional Republicans fanning out to cable news shows, along with support from longtime Trump ally Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina.
Later in the week Trump’s Department of Justice began setting in motion the rollback of popular gun safety measures contained within the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, including closing the gun show loophole on background checks. Even Republicans voted for that legislation just a few years ago.
And GOP lawmakers returned to one of their oldest hobbyhorses: renewing a push for a capital gains tax cut, giving a boost to the ultrawealthy just as middle- and working-class families contend with increased grocery and fuel costs that Trump continues to deny.
To be certain, many of these unpopular ideas are surfacing because the Republican Party has turned itself into something that more resembles a religion or cult marching in the shadow of Trump than a functioning political party.
But something else is at work.
Conservatives have spent decades creating an alternate reality that exists separate from the real world. The narratives of this false world are fed to millions of people via conservative media—most prominently through Fox News, but also through right-wing radio, podcasts, news sites and channels, along with magazines, newspapers, books, and other media.
The point of this fake world is to keep conservative-leaning voters in a state of constant agitation, fuming about the supposed excesses of the left while being fed a steady diet of lies about right-wing leaders, both elected and cultural, fighting against these forces.
In the recent past, senior GOP leaders like former Presidents George H.W. Bush and Ronald Reagan, along with other conservative figures like Sens. John McCain, Mitt Romney, and Mitch McConnell, knew that the right-wing media world was a fake but necessary political tool to keep voters in check and casting their ballots in service of the Republican Party.
But unlike his predecessors, Trump doesn’t just use this right-wing echo chamber to advance his political agenda: He is a voracious consumer of that world’s product and largely a true believer. That’s why Trump so often refers to memes and “facts” he saw on Fox News as if the world at large hangs on the network’s every word—like he does.
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But this isn’t reality for millions of people. Despite the success of right-wing media outlets, they haven’t fooled everyone yet.
Fox News launched in 1996 and has since become the most popular of the three major cable news channels. But it isn’t as if America has become a one-party state in the past three decades.
Since Fox’s debut, Democratic candidates were elected president in 1996, 2008, 2012, and 2020. And the Democratic presidential candidate won the popular vote in 2000 and 2016, despite not winning the White House.
Democrats have also won multiple congressional majorities during that time period, gaining control of the House and Senate—and sometimes both, despite the march of right-wing media.
What this shows is that for all of the right’s efforts, the “reality” they never tire of pushing is not dominant.
But Republicans, led by Trump, are operating as if it is. They are acting counter to the will of the public and have been losing elections so badly they are trying to rig congressional districts to negate voters’ intent.
This latest triumvirate of bad Republican ideas (and many more before it) exists because people on the right spend so much time talking among themselves in the phony universe they constructed.
While Democrats and liberals lack the same level of media platforms and a friendly ear in the mainstream media, their leaders have had to contend with reality far more often than the right-wing echo chamber. Thus, Democratic proposals on a swath of issues, from taxation to education to health care, fall much more in line with what people actually want.
Sometimes, particularly when elections have a low turnout, the right-wing bubble is more of a help to the GOP. These are the voters who fall for lies like the claim that Obamacare was socialized medicine, or the notion that the U.S. border was wide open under former President Joe Biden.
But elections that go beyond the base expose the vulnerability of the fake news universe. Republicans, busily pandering to voters who get most of their news from figures like Sean Hannity and Megyn Kelly, demonstrate a disconnect from reality that bewilders voters and can often send them into the Democratic column.
All signs show that Republicans are headed for electoral disaster in the midterm elections. A major reason for this is that the party, from Trump on down, seems detached from the reality facing millions of Americans.
The Republican media machine has been a major success. It’s also why the party is now failing.
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