It’s long been obvious that Trump thinks he is above the law, that the law does not apply to him. This is clear in his ludicrous attempts to claim that being (or having been) president means he gets absolute immunity from prosecution, but that rests on his status as a former president. He has always thought and acted that he is above the law simply because He Is Trump. He just extended that belief to include his time in the Oval Office. It also shows in his post-presidential behavior, the repeated violations of the gag orders being just one example.
But I suggest that Trump’s insistence that he is above the law is only one aspect of a larger delusion: He believes he is above reality. Or to put it another way: in his mind, reality is whatever he wants it to be at some particular moment, subject to change the next moment. Remember this WaPo analysis? Trump’s false or misleading claims total 30,573 over 4 years. Particularly dangerous was his refusal to deal with the reality of Covid; last night Chris Hayes, in his “Were you better off 4 years ago?” series, brought up Trump’s infamous speculation about injecting bleach to counter Covid, which led Lysol and other disinfectant manufacturers to immediately put out warnings saying DO NOT TRY THIS.
Here are a couple of examples from this morning’s stories. First: Trump has shared tales of courtroom spectacles with supporters. The reality is much more subdued.
Throughout the first six days of his trial, Trump’s dramatized retellings of his legal peril have veered considerably from the events actually unfolding in and around Manhattan’s criminal courthouse. In social media posts and in fundraising pitches, a frantic Trump shares tales of courtroom spectacles and plots against him, untethered from the subdued – and sometimes sleepy – rhythms of the criminal justice system in motion.
In one fundraising email on the first day of his trial, Trump claimed he “stormed out” of the proceedings. Reporters in the courtroom observed no such animations during the former president’s exit, but that didn’t stop Trump from repeating the falsehood in an email Friday.
Second is the way he tries to make people react to him as if he is still president. Why is Trump giving someone a ‘key to the White House’?
[Yesterday] Trump gave [former Japanese Prime Minister] Aso a key to the White House. Whether he offered the same patter about Aso presenting the key at the White House gates is unknown. . . . Yet here’s Donald Trump, acting as though he’s simply renting out the White House to President Biden and letting Aso know that he’s welcome to stop by and use the bowling alley anyway.
It’s the last part of that clip that is really revealing. Part of Trump’s game here could be political posturing, an attempt to build an image in the voters’ minds that he is already acting like a president. Except that no president has ever before had “keys to the White House” made to give away as gifts. Trump did this because, as the article explains, he really thinks that he owns the White House, that it’s another one of his properties, and that he has done so since Jan. 20, 2017:
Trump never seemed to consider his occupation of the White House as transitory any more than he considered the presidency in that way. He looked at both as though they were pieces of property that had come into his possession and that he could only lose if he chose to do so.
You may wonder why I’m bringing all this up again. Trump’s loose (to put it diplomatically) relationship to the real world has been discussed many times before, here and elsewhere. I have two reasons. First is that, as always happens eventually, reality is starting to take over. Trump is on trial for having tried to fake out reality by covering up an illegal campaign contribution which was made in pursuit of hiding the reality of his sex life from the voters. Even his civil trial for business fraud wasn’t as direct a confrontation with reality as this one is. Many people have commented on how difficult it has been for Trump to contain himself in a situation where he is not in control. What this really means is that he cannot fake or dodge or manufacture a reality because reality has slipped from his control. This is very likely to produce a final mental breakdown that the country will get to witness in real time.
The more serious concern I have is the number of Americans who have bought into, and continue to buy into, Trump’s denial of reality. This diary (story) is getting a little long, so I won’t go into the litany of “news” organizations who have made fortunes by distorting reality and who have found in Trump a perfect foil for their schemes. I will make reference to a longstanding argument of mine that revealed religions ultimately must rely on denial of reality for their continued domination. This is important because this is where much of Trump’s support comes from — Christian fundamentalists who have never accepted that the real world does not conform to their Biblical expectations. (One obvious — and extremely lethal — example is their insistence on a total ban on abortion, in the process denying the reality that this destroys the very lives they claim they are so concerned about.)
Politicians in legislative office are often able to indulge their fantasies about the world (though they shouldn’t), but an executive is expected to deal with the world as it really is. We spend billions of dollars a year on intelligence gathering and analysis, so that the president can have the most accurate picture of reality we can give him (or her). Mike Johnson’s recent epiphany on Ukraine aid is credited in large part to the classified intelligence briefings he got on what is really going on. Trump, on the other hand, was infamous for rejecting intelligence he didn’t like, that didn’t line up with his fantasy of the moment. Biden, of course, takes his intelligence briefings seriously.
This election is about nothing less than a referendum on reality. The direction of this country going forward will be defined by how it approaches the real world. Anyone thinking of voting for Trump — and for the GOP generally — needs to be reminded that, in the end, reality wins. The longer we deny reality, the bloodier reality’s victory will be.