The president believes what he wants to believe, creates a reality that fits his delusions, and then insists, with extraordinary energy and stamina, that his delusions are the truth. His psychological illness, moreover, is capable of outlasting anyone else’s mental health. Objective reality that contradicts his delusions is discounted as “fake news” propagated by “our country’s greatest enemy,” i.e., reporters. If someone behaved like this in my actual life, if someone kept insisting that the sea was red and the sky green, I’d assume they were a few sandwiches short of a picnic. It’s vital for us to remember this every day: Almost no one else in public life is so openly living in his own disturbed world.
There plainly is something amiss with the Buffoon-in-Chief’s data processing. I don’t know what name to give it, or even whether is has a name, but he certainly is well past garden variety lying.
It is equally certain that neither the Cabinet nor the Republican-controlled Congress can be relied upon to do its plain duty and put him out of office — and there is no more important business before the country than defending itself from Donald Trump.
I am not especially surprised by the perfervid loyalty evangelicals exhibit for Trump; they have merely transferred their devotion from one authoritarian cult to another. There is precedent for that; recall, for a particularly egregious example, how easily the Japanese transferred their loyalty for their Emperor-god to MacArthur at the end of World War II. I am taken aback by the comprehensive failure of character exhibited by congressional Republicans — and shame on all of us if the midterm elections aren’t ruinous for them.