Behind my desk, I found an old protest sign I used at our Tell Them Tuesday anti-Trump rallies. One side simply read (in bold red letters) IMPEACH! The other side said, “TRUMP IS AN OUTLIER—AN OUT AND OUT LIAR.
At that time, I thought Trump was a liar. After all, almost every sentence that comes out of his mouth is not true. Surely, he is the world’s biggest liar, from claiming more people showed up for his inauguration than did for Obama’s, to perpetrating the Big Lie that Biden lost the election and he really won.
New evidence points to the perfidy of Trump’s blatant falsehoods. I am almost six hundred pages into The January 6th Report. This tome, which led the way for later indictments, is must-reading for any American who wants to know the truth about January 6th. But I wish someone told me what I am about to tell you. Either you should just read the first part of this book, The Executive Summary (about 150 pages), or the second part, The Narrative, (about 500 pages.) If you read the Narrative, there is no reason to read the Summary. If you read the shorter Summary, there is no reason to read the Narrative. Reading both, I discovered, is frustratingly redundant.
The first chapter in the Narrative is entitled “The Big Lie” and sums up the “Stop the Steal” campaign with two words, “He lied.”
So the President of the United States did something he had planned to do long before election day. He lied.
“This is a fraud on the American public. This is an embarrassment to our country,” President Trump said. “We are getting ready to win this decision,” the President continued. “Frankly, we did win the election. We did win this election. Trump claimed, without offering any evidence, that a “major fraud” was “occurring in our nation.”
Thinking we had a president who blatantly lies is bad enough. But it is even worse than you think. Trump didn’t lie. Oh, he didn’t tell the truth. But to lie, you must have conscious awareness that what you are saying is false. Trump didn’t speak the truth, not because he was lying, but because he was, in denial. Yet Trump’s psychological denial transcends the normal tendency to deny disturbing news one cannot accept. Trump’s denial indicates he is pathologically unable to separate facts from fiction. He has lost touch with reality. He is delusional. In other words, he is too stupid and too crazy to know the truth.
To understand the difference between lying and denial we need to construct a two-by-two matrix and consider two variables, one is whether or not someone is telling the truth. The other is whether or not that person has awareness of what the truth is. This yields four possibilities. (1) Someone tells the truth and knows le is telling the truth. (2) Someone is telling a lie and knows le is telling a lie. (3) Someone is saying something which is not true, but believes what le is saying is true. (4) Someone is telling the truth, but doesn’t fully realize or know it is the truth. In the third scenario, someone is saying something not true, but believes it is true; there are two possibilities which can overlap. The person is wrong—doesn’t know the facts; andor the person is in denial—is unable to accept the facts. Yet there is a third possibility that supersedes simple ignorance or denial; it is possible the person is incapable of telling the difference between the truth and their own mental delusions. This applies to Trump. He is in denial he lost, he is too stupid to understand how he lost, and he has broken with reality so much he is incapable of realizing he lost.
Who am I to say that Trump is nuts? Well, first of all, I do have a Master’s degree in Psych, (although a PhD would give me more cred.) I consider myself to be a Political Psychologist. Although some claim you can’t diagnose someone you haven’t met in person, I have both seen Trump’s behavior on television ad nauseam. Plus, I have read at least couple of dozen books about Trump. Two of the best include Disloyal by Michael Cohen and Too Much and Never Enough, by his niece Mary Trump—who does have a PhD in Psychology. Indeed, this is my 200th diary here at Daily Kos, since my first article Mad Man, debuted where I made the case that Donald J. Trump is certifiably mentally ill. Now I have come first circle, as this diary pretty much says the same thing. Only in the past five years, Donald Trump’s mental condition has deteriorated considerably.
As everyone knows by now—unless they are a mindless member of the Trump cult—Donald has a severe case of malignant narcissism, plus he is a dangerous sociopath, aka, psychopath (Anti-Social personality Disorder.) (See The Sociopath in the White House.) Yet Trump was always that way. What is new is that as Trump’s dementia gradually gets worse, his contact with reality is gradually slipping away. One sign is his incessant projection. (See Mad Man Trump Has PDS—Trump Derangement Syndrome.) When Trump declares that Jack Smith is “deranged,” Trump is projecting his own derangement onto his nemesis. However, I possess some insight into insanity—or its many other names including schizophrenia, dementia praecox, psychosis, or just plain nuts or crazy—that few others can or are willing to admit. Before age twenty, I ended up in a mental hospital. The doctors said I had a mental breakdown, a psychotic break with reality, and attributed it to illicit drugs I tried in college.
That’s not the way I saw it. The way I saw it, I had deliberately attempted to get into the hospital by pretending to be crazy in order to study mental illness. My ostensible goal was to learn as much about mental illness as I could firsthand in the least amount of time. The mental hospital seemed to be the best place to learn, and I thought would be challenging to pretend to be crazy long enough to gain admission. I figured all I would have to do to get out again was act normal. I probably also wanted to impress a close female friend at college who I had a crush on. Indeed, when I told her what I intended to do, (hoping it sounded heroic) she tried to talk me out of it, worried I would get hurt.
Regardless of whether I was perfectly sane when I was labeled crazy or not; some who saw me when I was there insisted they saw nothing wrong with me. Within a couple of years, no one would ever suspect I was ever so diagnosed, or that I spent time in a mental hospital unless I told them. Yet I confess harboring a couple of delusions at that time which later I figured out were only delusions. For example, I imagined there was a vast Prospiracy, (as opposed to a conspiracy,) in which people would go out of their way to help others who needed help, in hopes they would join the Prospiracy themselves and in turn pay it forward to help others. I erroneously believed that as long as I was truly a help to the other patients in the hospital, I need not worry about being harmed when I was there or gaining my freedom to leave when I wanted to. I was wrong. Although such a ubiquitous organization was possible, it was far more fanciful wishful imaginings, rather than an actual real organization. The difference between sanity and insanity is not the presence of delusional thinking; it is the capacity to eventually learn one’s cherished delusions are wrong.
Trump is delusional. The difference between him and myself when I was nineteen, is that I was eventually able to realize some of my thoughts were only delusions, as I acquired more information demonstrating they weren’t actually true. Trump, on the other hand, daily is becoming more and more delusional, and truly believes the lies he tells others, no longer able to discern truth from his own wishful thinking. He has lied so much, he now believes his own lies, regardless of how many people or who tells him otherwise.
Trump’s problem is a combination of insanity and stupidity. His denial that he lost to Biden is so personally threatening to him, that he can’t believe it. Yet stupidity is a factor, too. When his advisors told him there was no credible evidence of massive voter fraud, and certainly not enough to overturn the election, Trump rejoined that perhaps the members of the FBI and DOJ (who are experts at investigating such things) didn’t see the same [bogus] articles on the internet that Trump read which claimed there was massive voter fraud. Trump is so delusional he is unable to hear what he doesn’t want to hear, and only can hear what he wants to hear. Consequently, he has lost touch with reality. There is a name for that: crazy.
Yet this is not the impression one gets reading The January 6th Report. They present the case that Trump understood he lost the election and was lying to hold onto power.
Trump’s decision to declare victory falsely on election night…was not a spontaneous decision. It was premeditated.
Other people in Trump’s circle lied and knew they were lying. Quoting Steve Bannon:
And what Trump’s going to do is just declare victory, right? He’s just going to say he is a winner. But that doesn’t mean he’s the winner. He’s just going to say he’s the winner.
Quoting Roger Stone:
The key thing to do is declare victory. Possession is 9/10s of the law. No, we won. Fuck you. Sorry. Over. We won…
My thesis is that Trump is so deranged he never was able to comprehend he lost. How could he? He never lost before. No matter how many times he failed, he never learned from failure, or even that he failed, because someone, often his Daddy, always bailed him out. The January 6th Report makes clear that others told him he lost the election, and occasionally Trump said things to indicate he knew he lost. However, even then, Trump was in hidden denial; speaking the truth to save face, but not really believing it. It was just a matter of time that Trump would surround himself only with sycophants who would tell him his fantasies were actually true.
Mary Trump makes the case that Trump’s “reckless hyperbole and unearned confidence…hid Donald’s pathological weaknesses and insecurities…He began to believe his own hype.” Moreover, she argues his stupidity contributes to his delusional thinking:
He may have a long undiagnosed learning disability that for decades interfered with his ability to process information…
The disparity between the level of confidence required for running a country and his incompetence has widened, revealing his delusions more starkly than before.
Donald, who understands nothing about history, constitutional principles, geopolitics, diplomacy, (or anything else really) and was never pressed to demonstrate such knowledge…
He is Frankenstein without a conscience.
If he is afforded a second term it will be the end of American democracy.
It was not that Trump wasn’t told the truth. He was unable to believe the truth. But that was not the way they saw it in The January 6th Report:
President Trump was reminded on Election Day that a large number of mail-in ballots still remain to be counted over the coming days… The early returns are going to be positive…
President Trump, however, made a different choice. In an extraordinary breach of the American democratic process, he decided to exploit the confusion about the staggered timing of the vote counting to deceive the American public about the election results.
President Trump knew about the Red Mirage [early votes for Trump]. He chose to lie about it repeatedly—even after being directly informed that his claims were false…The President consciously disregarded the facts that did not support his Big Lie.
When I first read the above, I was convinced Trump was deliberately deceiving others for his own gain. This assumption, however, is based on the premise that Trump actually knew more about the voting process than the average American. It is awful to think that the President of the United States is more confused about how a President is elected in America than the average American. Yet that is probably the case. Regardless of how many times he was told or reminded, Trump was the one who was confused. In his warped mind, since thousands of avid supporters showed up at his rallies, he had to have been re-elected. In his warped mind, if the numbers didn’t reflect what he believed to be true, that only meant the numbers were wrong, i.e. the election was stolen.
There is a scene from Seinfeld where Jerry takes a lie-detector test.
Jerry: I don't know. Maybe I can beat the machine.
Elaine: Oh, who do you think you are? Castanza?
Jerry: Hey you know what? I have access to one of the most deceitful, duplicitous, deceptive minds of our time. Who better to advise me?
Jerry: So George, how do I beat this lie detector?
George: I'm sorry, Jerry, I can't help you.
Jerry: Come on, you've got the gift. You're the only one that can help me.
George: Jerry, just remember. It's not a lie... if you believe it.
Trump is Castanza. Trump truly believes he won. No wonder so many of his followers believe him. When he says he won, it comes from his heart as he honestly believes he can’t lose, not from his addled brain. Trump smacks of sincerity because he believes the lies he spews, regardless of how outrageous or how removed from reality they actually are.
While I was working on this article, Bill Dalton of the Holland Sentinel published a piece called, My Take. Is Trump sane or insane? Dalton makes the case that perhaps Trump’s legal defense should plead insanity. After all, there is plenty of evidence Trump has lost touch with reality.
A man with a gun walks into a bank and passes a note reading, “I only need, uh, $11,780.” He’s later charged with attempted bank robbery but defends himself by telling the judge: “It was a PERFECT note.” Trump still claims he did nothing wrong by asking Georgia election officials to “find” 11,780 votes so he could win the state, after threatening them with prosecution.
You be the judge: Sane or insane?
I judge him insane. However, I also deem the idea Trump should plead insanity in court to be preposterous. First of all, Trump would never go along with it. Nor would his lawyers dare to suggest it. Trump’s overarching strategy is to avoid his legal problems by becoming President where his “Get of Jail Free” card will protect him from any legal consequences. This idea itself sounds crazy, but as Mary Trump pointed out numerous times, Trump never had to pay for the consequences of his behavior. Someone always bailed him out.
I take no solace in the notion that Trump is mentally a basket case. The future of our country would be safer, if he were merely a sane criminal who knew he was lying to hold onto power.
When Trump won in 2016, he beat the odds, as he only had a 15% chance of beating Hillary Clinton. Fortunately, he lost to Biden in 2020, when Trump’s odds of winning were down to 10%. After he lost, I thought (hoped) Trump’s political career was over. Now it appears the Republicans plan to have the criminal mad man run against Biden again. I figure his chances of winning against Biden this time are only 5%. However, even one chance out of twenty that our entire democratic system of government will be destroyed in the next election if he somehow wins, scares the hell out me.
In the ensuing months, Trump’s insanity will only become more and more apparent. Yet tragically, most of those who support him now will never notice. If they didn't care about his incompetence and corruptness; if they didn't care about his cruelty and hatred; if they don’t care about his stupidity and lack of knowledge; if they don’t care he is a criminal who tried to destroy democracy to stay in power; while will they care if he is certifiably insane?