The crowd size episode was idiotic, but contained its own autocratic foreboding. “The point was to demonstrate the party’s power to proclaim and promulgate a falsehood,” wrote Anne Applebaum in a cover story in The Atlantic, “History Will Judge the Complicit.” Applebaum, who has reported extensively on European tyrants, described the crowd fiasco as a kind of authoritarian’s flex. Trump perpetrated this bizarre claim because he could. “Sometimes the point isn’t to make people believe a lie,” Applebaum said. “It’s to make people fear the liar.”
