It’s fun to imagine what life could be. Growing up, I remember playing wiffle ball with friends and we would imagine ourselves as different MLB players. We’d try to imitate how they would pitch, and how they would stand at the plate. We had a lot of fun imagining these things and many others. We played with our action figures and different toys and imagined a whole host of different scenarios for them. But this was our imagination. We imagined a lot of things as kids. We made things up that weren’t real all the time. Our elected leaders like to imagine things as well. Some imagine made up numbers. Some imagine made up stories about specific groups of people. And some imagine things were stolen from them. At the end of the day they are no different from all the imagining we did as kids. It was all made up.

The President and the Republicans he has surrounded himself with, are quite the imaginative storytellers. In fact, the Vice President himself said, “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.” So it is no surprise that they continue to do this. After all, it works and people continue to buy it. He used that line last year, giving us a glimpse into the imagination of the President, the Vice President, and numerous prominent Republicans when they talked about Haitian immigrants eating dogs and cats. Quite the fable they cooked up there to push their anti-immigrant agenda forward. Of course, many know this was completely made up, but that part doesn’t matter. All that matters is what they say is true.

We’ve gotten many more glimpses into their imaginations since then:

  • Downtown LA is on fire from violent protests.
  • Drug prices will come down by 1000%.
  • Only the most dangerous illegal immigrants will be deported.
  • Those illegal immigrants that we wrongly deported to a foreign prison without due process were actually dangerous gang members.
  • The tariffs are bringing the country trillions of dollars.
  • The economy is great and prices are coming down.
  • 300 million people died from drug overdoses in 2024.
  • That wasn’t the President’s signature on the letter to his friend Jeffrey Epstein.
  • Republicans don’t engage in dangerous rhetoric.
  • Most political violence comes from the left.
  • Democrats want to shut down the government because they want healthcare for illegal immigrants.
  • Portland is war-ravaged.
  • The US is done bailing out other countries.

The list goes on. All inventions of the mind, now gospel on the right. Attempt to say the opposite of any of these things to someone deep in the MAGA-sphere and you are likely to be met with canned talking points, whataboutism, goalpost moving, and/or insults. Literally, you could go line-by-line and provide all the available sources to back up the opposite of the claims above and it still wouldn’t matter. For journalists of once revered publications are the enemy because the President said so, and you would just be gaslit into oblivion.

As time goes, the imagination gets more creative and cooks up worse stories that only serve to pit everyday Americans against one another, and against anyone in general. And as people continue to buy in, we slide further and further from reality. As Orwell said, “Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else.” And this brings us back to our imagination as kids. Pretending to be Ken Griffey Jr. while playing wiffle ball with friends is completely harmless. Pretending our cities are war-ravaged hellscapes or that millions of immigrants are violent criminals is not. Don’t be fooled by it.