In 1982, William Goldman published a memoir of his time in Hollywood, where he had written the screenplays for Marathon Man , Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid , All the President’s Men , and The Princess Bride , among others. The book had a priceless title, with resonance well beyond the screen trade. It was called Which Lie Did I Tell? And that’s the trouble with lying, isn’t it? How do you keep the lies straight? It’s one thing to keep track of which lie you told to which customer, boss, or spouse — that’s hard enough. But it’s a whole other thing to regularly lie to the media, or to voters, or to other countries. Eventually, you get caught out, even by the most gullible. And credibility is a hard thing to recover. We have been subsumed by a culture of lying, embodied by a Republican Party whose commitment to it predates Trump by at least four decades. They’ve spent that time building a lie machine that has served them extremely well, but is now vis...
Reading this again was a bit of a gut-punch. I wrote it in August 2020, as a reaction to the Republican Convention that nominated Trump to run against Biden. Trump didn’t get his four more years, at least not then, but it wasn’t for lack of trying. January 6 was a particularly nice try, but that came six months later. My observations at the time foreshadowed a dark future that has matured into the insanity we are now witnessing — no longer coming soon, but here now. The election I write about in this piece happened six years ago, but it might as well be today. Donald Trump told a joke the other day. It was a real howler, sort of along the lines of “Russia, if you’re listening,” or “Slow the testing down,” or “I could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue.” You’ll recall that we didn’t know those were actually jokes at first. We thought they were at best verbal atrocities and at worst treason. But then his flunkies explained that it was but another exam...