There was an article in today’s Post Dispatch by Eugene Robinson in which he described the current crisis as “a battle for objective truth over paranoid fantasy,” and observes that the Republican Party is on the wrong side.

I find remarkable the continued adherence of Republicans to the lies of Trump. This suggests that they think complicity in these lies is still to their advantage. 

Most of the Republicans in Congress are educated people of average intelligence who ought to know that

1)    Wearing masks is a proven way to restrict the spread of COVID-19. 

But while legislators were hiding in cramped quarters during the attack on the Capitol, Republican congressmen were filmed resolutely refusing to wear masks, just like Trump. Do they still believe that COVID-19 is no worse than the flu? Why did they refuse the masks that were offered to them? Would it have hurt them to put on a mask in those close quarters? No, but they thought that putting on masks would make them seem less than Trumpian.

2)    The presidential election was deemed sound and fair by all responsible parties who have examined it.

But we still have Republican legislators explicitly or implicitly questioning the validity of the election, echoing Trump’s lies in this sphere as well. Do they believe that the election officials, state by state, who monitored the election are corrupt? Do they too believe that the great number of judges who rejected allegations of fraud were ideologically driven or on the take?

I suppose that maybe a few of these Trumpian legislators do believe that COVID-19 is a hoax and that the presidential election was rigged. But most of them are, it seems to me, far too intelligent to have been taken in by Trump’s obvious lies. So why support what they know to be untrue?

They do so because covering up for Trump and repeating and defending his lies is an ingrained habit developed over a period of four years, and because a lot of their voters, convinced by the lies that Trump and they have been telling, would be alienated if they departed from Trumpian orthodoxy. Rejection of masks and doubting the election are badges of Trumpism that they are afraid to give up because numbers of their constituents choose to FEEL with great determination that Trump’s lies are the truth.