I basically agree with you on this. But those in the club are only repeating the lies they hear from Trump or his designated MAGA political proxies, such as JD Vance. The club's rank & file accept all dog whistles aimed at them. But only after the MAGA candidates or proxies choose which dog whistle has 'grown legs' enough to spread widely through repetition.
In 1994 when Bill Clinton had been president for 2 years, the GOP won control of the House of Representatives. Newt Gingrich became Speaker of the House. His strategy was to create a flood of big whopper lies that might disable Clinton's presidency. He wanted to see which big whoppers got repeated, and then continued to repeat them again & again. The public got so used to hearing these lies that they eventually accepted them. Trump and his MAGA crowd are simply following Gingrich's big lie strategy.
Sometime during the mid 1990s, Bill Clinton replaced his Press Secretary or Chief of Staff (?) with a more aggressive spokesman. (I also don't remember who that was. Maybe Mike McCarry?) This new guy understood how to disarm those frequent lies – with a rapid flurry of refutals & denials. Their method worked because Gingrich & the GOP dropped the lie as soon as it became clear that it would never 'grow legs'. And they came up with more & more big lies.
That GOP strategy was only neutralized by the Democratic Party's rapid response against them. It helped if the response sounded outraged by the original lie. Their previous strategy had failed. Appealing to logic & common decency only worked within the Democratic Party.
There's nothing new in politics
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