Maybe it’s time to start believing Donald Trump.
Not what he says, of course.
Not the untruths, the distortions and misinterpretations of fact, the exaggerations, the dystopic hyperbole, the general gloomy outright zaniness of his public pronouncements.
Those are departures from reality that anyone with open eyes and a clear mind can see.
No, it’s time to take seriously the possibility that the former president of the United States actually believes what he says.
If so, that’s an even more frightening prospect than assuming that he’s just been lying all along.
His rambling and often incoherent press conference at Mar-a-Lago certainly suggested that the thin threads connecting Trump to the rational world have snapped.
During his hour-long exchange with reporters, the former president stacked one delusional assertion after another on top of each other as if he were building a wall to keep unpleasant realities from immigrating into his mind.
He said his address to the Jan. 6, 2021, mob drew a larger crowd than the Rev. Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial did in 1963. (It didn’t, as photographs, police reports and other documentary evidence prove.)
He said there was a peaceful transfer of power when he left the presidency in January 2021. (There wasn’t, as mountains of video of the mob he summoned and incited storming the Capitol and myriad trials and convictions that followed have documented.)
He said polls show him far ahead in this year’s election battle between him and Vice President Kamala Harris. (They don’t. What they do show is a tightening race with all the momentum, at the moment, on Harris’ side.)
He said.
He said.
He said.
Almost none of what Trump rambled on about was true.
Yet he droned on about it even though he knew—he knows—facts contradicting his blather would be presented almost as soon as the words left his mouth.
The question is … why?
From the time that he descended the escalator nine years ago to declare his candidacy for the presidency, the supposition has been that Trump either was lying, just didn’t know any better or flat didn’t care one way or the other when he said something that obviously wasn’t true.
Politics for Trump then was a kind of a performance art, an exercise in manipulating the moods and mindsets of whatever audience he could reach.
When he came to occupy the Oval Office as a minority president, the belief was that he manipulated the truth in the interest of political self-preservation. He stirred up one seemingly needless controversy after another to keep an irresistible majority from coalescing in opposition to him, particularly once it became clear impeachment and prosecution were genuine threats to both his presidency and his personal liberty.
In other words, the presumption was that there were rational explanations for Trump’s willingness to ignore reality and alter facts.
The former president’s Mar-a-Lago meltdown press conference, though, left a different impression.
During that confab with reporters, Trump distorted and denied the truth even when it was not in his interest to do so.
He had everything to gain by granting that he was an underdog facing a great political challenge who needed the support of all his followers and the aid of all his allies.
Instead, he presented himself as all-powerful, denying both poll numbers and fundraising tallies, and denigrated his opponents in ways guaranteed to galvanize their supporters and backers.
He acted almost as if he wanted—and wants—to lose, even though losing could mean he spends his sunset years behind bars.
There are two possible explanations.
One is that Donald Trump has become determinedly, willfully self-destructive in his late 70s, eager in his advancing old age to make it easier for his adversaries to bring him down.
The second is that he honestly believes his own nonsense—that he no longer can tell the difference between fact and fantasy, truth and falsity, reality and delusion.
I’m not sure which possibility is more disturbing.
A man determined to destroy his own life isn’t likely to worry much about the damage he does to others’ existences.
And a guy who can’t tell the difference between what’s real and what’s an illusion likely also can’t tell the difference between right and wrong.
That’s why the scariest possibility isn’t that Donald Trump is lying.
It’s that he honestly believes what he’s saying.