In this Age of Shamelessness, it takes a truly shocking piece of hypocrisy or deceit to grab the headlines. The kind of run-of-the-mill flip-flops that once dogged more conventional politicians like 2012 Mitt Romney simply don't register. You've got to go big, and that's exactly what Republicans have done with their new push, in the home stretch of the 2018 midterm elections, to cast themselves as The Defenders of Your Healthcare. That's right: the party of Repeal and Go Fuck Yourself is now the People's Champion.

Donald Trump, American president, threw down the gauntlet Tuesday in that regard:

This content is imported from Twitter. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.

First of all, this format for a Presidential Address remains incredibly weird. And here's another reminder that this is the take they decided to go with—the one where they seem to cut the world's most powerful man off before he presumably did something Very Presidential.

But ignore all that, because this is another festival of lies. That starts with the claim—which the president feels free to just say, without a lick of evidence, hoping it will stick—that Medicare for All would lead to most Americans' taxes "doubling, even tripling." The study touted by conservatives as the death knell for Senator Bernie Sanders' MFA plan, produced by the libertarian-conservative types at the Koch Brothers-funded Mercatus Center at George Mason University, found it would cost $32 trillion over 10 years.

That does indeed sound like a lot, until you hear that it's actually $303 billion less than we'll spend under the same study's projections for our current system. It's just people would pay through taxes, rather than insurance premiums to private companies, and wealthy Americans might see a hike. Remember, this is under calculations from a group pretty openly hostile to the concept of single-payer healthcare. Plus, 30 million more people would have healthcare coverage. But yeah, sure, "Venezuela."

Chip Somodevilla Getty Images

This pivot from Trump is important in the larger context of the midterms, where it seems Republicans have seen in their polling that they've got a healthcare problem. A poll in August found it was the number one issue among likely voters. Last month, a Fox News poll found the public has warmed to Obamacare significantly, that a strong majority would like to see more people insured even if it costs the government more money, and that voters believe Democrats can better handle the issue of healthcare by a 15-point margin. In a Kaiser Family Foundation poll, 75 percent of respondents supported the Affordable Care Act's protections for people with preexisting conditions.

That last part seems to have really gotten Republicans' attention, because GOP candidates all over the country, in races for federal or state office, have started cranking out ads touting their support for covering people with preexisting conditions. Often, these productions feature the candidates' relatives who have health conditions. And often, they feature gobsmackingly shameless distortions of their records.

Here's Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker:

This content is imported from Twitter. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.

Covering pre-existing conditions is personal to me. Plus, it’s the right thing to do: pic.twitter.com/WmbnFNoX2Z — Scott Walker (@ScottWalker) October 15, 2018

This was part of a series of attempts to suggest this was a personal issue for Walker. But he also authorized his state attorney general to sign onto a lawsuit brought by 20 Republican-controlled states looking to immediately suspend the Affordable Care Act. That's the same ACA that put in place protections for preexisting conditions. Maybe it really is personal for Walker, in that his relatives probably won't lose their coverage if the lawsuit he supports succeeds, but millions of ordinary Americans will.

Here's Josh Hawley, who's running for U.S. Senate from Missouri:

This content is imported from YouTube. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.

Hawley is currently one of those 20 state attorneys general who is suing to gut Obamacare and its protections for preexisting conditions. He now says he wants to protect preexisting conditions independently of the ACA, though he hasn't really specified any policies that would do that. You'll just have to take his word for it!

Here's Dana Rohrabacker, "Putin's favorite congressman," who's trying to save his California congressional seat:

This content is imported from Twitter. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.

For me, healthcare is personal. When it comes to preexisting conditions I'm using my heart as well as my head, advocating a creative bi-partisan approach. https://t.co/nVYq3iKRqI pic.twitter.com/d2McgjE5Zg — Dana Rohrabacher (@DanaRohrabacher) October 3, 2018

According to The New York Times, Rohrabacker has a creative plan involving Medicare to treat preexisting conditions once Republicans successfully gut the Affordable Care Act. But in practice, he voted for the Republicans' American Health Care Act, a.k.a. the Repeal and Go Fuck Yourself Bill. That would have slashed Medicaid funding—stripping many children of care—and allowed states to pursue waivers to carve out exceptions for preexisting condition coverage, which essentially would have ended those protections in states where insurance companies and their lobbyists exercise sufficient control over the state legislature.

Talk is cheap in the Age of Shamelessness, and there's no better example than the president. In the video address above, he cast himself as a defender of healthcare coverage. At a rally last month, he claimed his administration and Republicans "will protect patients with pre-existing conditions." Yet his Justice Department told a federal court in June it would no longer defend those provisions of the Affordable Care Act against the same lawsuit filed by those 20 state attorneys general, including Hawley and Wisconsin's Brad Schimel.

So, in summary:

Some of these guys are suing to end the protections.

Some have voted for laws that would gut them.

Trump's administration is offering them an open goal.

All of the above are now saying they're the defenders of those same protections.

It's a gaslight, folks, and it's bad for ya. How can Republicans bill themselves as the True Defenders of Your Healthcare when, simultaneously, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is saying stuff like this?

This content is imported from Twitter. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.

McConnell tells Bloomberg News the rising deficit under Trump (now $779b) is "disturbing" and argued the problem is Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid — which he lamented are "difficult, if not impossible" to cut "when you have unified government." — Sahil Kapur (@sahilkapur) October 16, 2018

This is absolutely insane. Beltway reporters' favorite deficit-hawk, Paul Ryan, became Speaker of the House a few weeks after fiscal year 2015 ended. The federal budget deficit that year was $439 billion. Next year, FY 2019, it will be $1.085 trillion. Republicans have controlled both houses of Congress through that entire time, and the White House for two years of it. But these people who preached about The Coming National Debt Apocalypse when Democrats held power spent their time passing a massive debt-financed tax cut for corporations and the rich. They said this $1.5 trillion cut to U.S. Treasury revenue would pay for itself. It will not. Then, with Democrats, they exploded discretionary spending, particularly through military funding jacked up to $717 billion in 2019. That's more than at least the next seven countries combined, many of which are allies, and it's more than the Trump administration even requested. It was part of a $1.3 trillion spending bill.

Alex Wong Getty Images

But it was never about the debt or the deficit, was it. There are no Tea Party Patriots holding rallies on the National Mall now that the Congressional Budget Office estimates that debt will rise to 96 percent of GDP by 2028. (Tea Party organizer Tim Chapman told The New York Times Tuesday that "the Tea Party wave of 2010 was animated by federal spending, but that has definitely subsided." Strange! Perhaps it has something to do with changes to The Presidential Complexion.) As others are increasingly saying outright, the plan was always to slash taxes on the wealthy, then cite the resulting budget shortfalls as a reason to cut "entitlement" programs like Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security on the basis they constituted out-of-control spending.

There are a lot of things to change in this country. One is that we ought to call Medicare and Social Security what they actually are: earned benefits that recipients have been paying into their whole lives. We ought to call Medicaid part of the social safety net that any humane society with the means provides. And we ought to find a new way to categorize what Republicans are doing right now when they cast themselves as The Real Defenders of Healthcare. "False" is no longer sufficient. "Flip-flop" is useless. Hypocrisy is drowning in a tsunami of shamelessness, and threatening to take us all under if we don't keep fighting the swirling current.

Jack Holmes Politics Editor Jack Holmes is the Politics Editor at Esquire, where he writes daily and edits the Politics Blog with Charles P Pierce.

This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io