Trump's GOP must hide reality at all cost

Republicans are now accusing the Republican National Committee of concealing internal data about Trump’s unpopularity from down-ballot Republican candidates.

  WaPo

Because, of course if they knew how unpopular he really is, they'd try to distance themselves from him.

Since Trump’s election in 2016, critical “voter scores” — sophisticated polling-based analytics that the RNC provides to party committees and candidates — have conspicuously omitted an essential detail for any down-ballot race: how voters in specific states and congressional districts feel about Trump. Republican insiders believe these analytics are being withheld to try and prevent GOP candidates from publicly distancing themselves from the president or leaking unfavorable results that embarrass Trump.

Actually that latter factor is probably more important ... at least to Trump.

“They don’t want you to know if it isn’t good,” says former RNC chairman Michael Steele, a vocal Trump critic. “There’s a lot of data they’re sitting on that they’re not sharing.” Steele adds that today, “the RNC is not an independent actor; the RNC is now a part of the Trump campaign. The question now isn’t, ‘What do you need?’ The question is, ‘Do you support Donald Trump?’”

[...]

[Dan Sena, who ran the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s 2018 recapture of the House,] said this info is crucial to how “modern” campaigns run targeted digital advertising in particular. “This information allows you to look for independents who like the candidate but have mixed feelings about the president,” he said. “These voters are going to be more persuadable.”

Sena opined that this omission of data was such glaring “malpractice” that it has to be “intentional,” adding: “They clearly don’t want anyone overperforming the president.”

[...]

Republicans have canceled primaries in multiple states, in part due to “months of behind-the-scenes maneuvering” by Trump campaign operatives hoping to “smooth” Trump’s path to the nomination. This shields Trump from political competition — and criticism.

Of a piece with an authoritarian government controlling information.

Trump is now using data provided to him by the Mexican government to paint a misleading picture of what’s happening at the border — and is even using it to displace information provided by his own government.

On Tuesday, Trump tweeted out a chart that purported to show a sharp decline in migrants remaining in the United States pending processing, because of the new arrangement in which Mexico cracks down on their passage and some migrants are sent back there. Trump touted “Incredible progress.”

[...]

[T]his chart was supplied to Trump by Mexican officials. Though there has been a decline in border crossings, in reality, U.S. government data shows that the picture is far less rosy, and migrant crossings are still very high.

[...]

That is startling. But it’s only the latest in a long trend. I’ve already documented numerous examples[*] in which government officials wheeled into action to make Trump’s lies and obsessions into truths, in some cases putting out “official” information explicitly shaped to do so.

[...]

We keep discussing these things as the latest examples of Trump’s “post-truth presidency." But what also deserves mention here is the kind of deep, seething contempt all this shows for the voters, and really for democracy and governing — indeed, for the very notions of good-faith voter deliberation and official decision-making on which those things rely.

Everything must always be pressed into service — even, it appears, to the detriment of the political needs of down-ballot candidates in Trump’s own party — for the single highest good of propping up the Cult of Trump.

Welcome to the Modern American GOP. *

By my count, this has happened at least seven times:

In January 2017, after the media reported on Trump’s paltry inaugural crowd size, resulting in enraged but preposterous pushback from Trump, he dispatched then-press secretary Sean Spicer to tell multiple lies buttressing his stance.

[...]

After Trump repeatedly alleged widespread fictitious voter fraud in 2016, the White House set up an official commission to “study” the issue. When it flopped, a dissenting member explicitly declared the motive was to make Trump’s lies true.

[...]

When Trump declared before the midterm elections that “criminals and unknown Middle Easterners are mixed in” with migrant caravans, multiple officials tried to bolster this claim by offering an official-seeming statistic about terrorism arrests that was entirely spurious and proved nothing of the kind.

[...]

When Trump vowed a surprise 10 percent middle class tax cut before the midterms, officials were caught off guard, but nonetheless sprang into action to try to create the impression this was a real promise by, for instance, discussing a nonbinding pledge. The tax cut never happened.

To justify suspending the credentials of CNN’s Jim Acosta after he annoyed Trump, then-White House press secretary Sarah Sanders shared a video that experts determined had been deceptively edited to make Acosta look physically abusive toward a press aide.

[...]

Trump repeatedly told stories about traffickers tying up migrant women and silencing them with tape. After The Post flatly debunked Trump’s assertion, a top border official circulated an internal request for “any information” that would support the claim.

To buttress Trump’s distortions of the migrant threat, the Department of Homeland Security produced a slick official presentation about the border that claimed nearly 4,000 known or suspected terrorists had been blocked from entering the United States. But this number had nothing whatsoever to do with efforts to cross the border, a distinction multiple officials also dishonestly fudged.

  WWaPo

And then recently, the Sharpie hurricane incident.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.