Has Trump Become Unhinged or is the the Truth Even Worse?

Sadly, it is difficult to know which is the bigger liar and/or more detached from objective reality

As the father of three children who collectively have five children themselves, I woory about the future of America.  I cannot think of a time since the Cuban Missile Crisis when I have been as concerned about the future of the nation and the threat of nuclear war.  The main difference between now and those days in the beginnings of the 1960's and now is that with John F. Kennedy in the White House we had a calm, steady and rational individual occupying the White House.  Today, we have the mentally imbalanced, if not insane, Der Trumpenführer who on the international area still thinks he is playing a role on Celebrity Apprentice.  And when he is not engaging in incredible lies, Trump seemingly is trying to destroy the public's belief in reason, logic and objective facts.  Any sane person - which, I'm sorry, excludes evangelical Christians and Christofascists - ought to be terrified at the prospects with a demented and/or pathological lying individual in the White House and threats posed by North Korea not to mention Russia, the latter of which must be rejoicing at Trump's trashing of America's standing in the world.  A column in the Washington Post looks at frightening indications that Trump is unhinged mentally.  Here are highlights:

This morning, after the news broke that NBC News has fired veteran anchor Matt Lauer for inappropriate sexual behavior, President Trump mused that NBC executives should be fired for putting out “Fake News,” and unleashed this broadside: “Check out Andy Lack’s past!”

This call for a lng, given the sexual charook into vague allegations against NBC News’ chairman prompted some to marvel at how “brazen” Trump is beiges leveled at him, too. Similar surprise greeted Trump’s willingness to endorse Roy Moore while shrugging that Moore “totally denies” the believable charges against him, as that reminded everyone just how lacking in credibility were his own dismissals of so many equally believable accounts about himself. 

But such incredulity misses the deeper significance of this stuff. The brazenness of it is the whole point — his utter shamelessness itself is meant to achieve his goal. In any given case, Trump is not trying to persuade anyone of anything as much as he is trying to render reality irrelevant, and reduce the pursuit of agreement on it to just another part of the circus. He’s asserting a species of power — the power to evadeconstraints normally imposed by empirically verifiable facts, by expectations of consistency, and even by what reasoned inquiry deems merely credible. The more brazen or shameless, the more potent is the assertion of power.  

The Post reports today that Trump has taken to privately questioning the authenticity of the “Access Hollywood” tape of him repeatedly boasting about his affection for sexual assault. The Post also reports that when things are going particularly badly, he calls confidantes to “boast about his successes.” 

To date, Trump has made over 1,600 false or misleading claimsas president. Routinely, the lies are demonstrably false, often laughably so. But this actually serves his ends. It is impossible to disentangle this from his constant effort to undermine the news media, seen again in today’s NBC tweet. In many cases the attacks on the media are outlandishly ridiculous, dating back to the tone-setting assertion that the media deliberately diminished his inaugural crowd sizes, even though the evidence was decisive to the contrary. Here again, the absurdity is the whole point: In both the volume and outsize defiance of his lies, Trump is asserting the power to declare the irrelevance of verifiable, contradictory facts, and with them, the legitimate institutional role of the free press, which at its best brings us within striking distance of the truth. 

Trump represents something broader, “an organized campaign to discredit the mainstream press in this country,” which “takes many forms.” . . . .  The goal is to render fact- and evidence-based inquiry itself a cause for suspicion.

Margaret Sullivan, summing up the mindset  . . . . , quotes Hannah Arendt: “If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer.”  As Trump biographer Tim O’Brien puts it, Trump constantly “tells fables to himself” and “about himself,” and has long self-consciously regarded this as “one of his great skills.” Trump has been doing it for so long that the separation between instinct and conscious technique has probably disappeared. But one thing is clear: Terms like “lying” or “delusional” don’t do justice to what we’re seeing here, and we have not yet seriously reckoned with its true nature and what it really means.

Be very, very afraid.