Trump has no incentive to even try to appear truthful. I think the ship has sailed on that one already. Everyone either knows he’s an inveterate and compulsive liar or doesn’t care… or doesn’t know the difference. But, as Brian Stelter pointed out Monday, there’s a great big tell when he feels he’s “at his most vulnerable, when he feels most threatened: he tells fans “not to believe their own eyes and ears, like when he called the deadly J-6 insurrection “a ‘love fest,’ denying the video evidence of the violence.”
“Yesterday,” wrote Stelter, “after Kamala Harris finished a week of arena-size rallies, he claimed that images of her crowds were ‘fake’ and AI-generated. Specifically, Trump embraced a conspiracy theory— touted by pro-Trump social-media accounts known for peddling nonsense— that the Harris campaign had posted a fake crowd photo from her August 7 event in Romulus, Michigan.
The turnout at Harris events is entirely real, and political analysts suspect that the crowds she has attracted are making Trump jealous and nervous. But the AI lie is about more than Trump’s size anxiety— it portends a dark and desperate chapter in this already distressing presidential-election season.
Every time Trump challenges his fans to side with him over photographic proof of reality, it’s disrespectful. I have been keeping an informal list of such episodes since the inauguration-crowd-size controversy of 2017, and they are typically driven by Trump’s enormous insecurity.
“The first lie of the Trump presidency,” as The Atlantic’s Megan Garber dubbed the inauguration freakout, began with a 5 a.m. segment on CNN the day after Trump was inaugurated. The CNN anchor John Berman very gently pointed out that Trump had predicted “they were going to break records with the crowds” in Washington, but “it doesn’t look like they did,” and he showed a graphic juxtaposing Barack Obama’s historic 2009 crowd on the left and Trump’s smaller crowd on the right. Trump erupted, and his aides came up with “alternative facts” to deny reality.
Toward the end of his presidency, Trump minimized the crowd sizes at protests, claiming that Black Lives Matter drew a “much smaller crowd in D.C. than anticipated” when in fact a rally over the death of George Floyd in police custody was the largest gathering in the nation’s capital since the Women’s March on the day after his inauguration.
More recently, during his hush-money trial in Lower Manhattan this spring, Trump was reportedly disappointed that his supporters did not flock to the area around the courthouse. He made excuses when reporters pointed out that the park across the street was practically empty. “Thousands of people were turned away from the courthouse,” he lied, calling the area “an armed camp to keep people away.” I pulled out my cameraphone to show how easy it was to visit the neighborhood, and told New Yorkers to come see for themselves.
But Trump’s repeated claims that you shouldn’t believe your own eyes have been buttressed by his near-decade-long insistence that real news is “fake.” A Trump devotee would have a hard time trusting my photo of the wide-open courthouse entrance over Trump’s comforting lie.
I have come to view this as a method of control. The rejection of video evidence, the dismissal of photo proof, even the new lie invoking AI— these claims all leave people arguing over the most basic tenets of reality, and cause some people to give up and give in. As Chico Marx asked in the 1933 film Duck Soup, “Who are ya gonna believe, me or your own eyes?” Richard Pryor later adapted the line: “Who you gonna believe? Me, or your lying eyes?” Trump has brought the concept into the 21st century.
Every instance of Trump disputing the indisputable is revealing in its own way. As Hurricane Dorian sideswiped the Eastern Seaboard, in the fall of 2019, Trump contradicted his own government’s weather maps and claimed that Alabama was in the path of the hurricane when the state was not, then tried to convince people that his faulty forecast was correct. That same year, as Britain’s Prince Andrew was ensnared in sexual-misconduct allegations, Trump said “I don’t know him, no,” despite multiple photos of the two men together, including one taken just six months before.
Vulnerability seems to be the through line here— whether Trump is at risk of trivial embarrassment, criminal exposure, or being caught in lies. A public figure with truth on their side would say Roll the tape to show they’re right. Trump, instead, says, Don’t believe the tape. Just believe me instead.
The aftermath of January 6 is probably the most extreme example of his reality-denial. He watched the insurrection unfold on live TV but then tried to erase the public’s memory of the images. On the one-year anniversary of the attack, Representative Jamie Raskin said on CNN that he felt bad for Trump adherents because “they are essentially in a political religious cult, and their cult leader, Donald Trump, is telling them they can’t believe their own eyes, the evidence of their own experience, and their own ears.”
That’s what Trump did again yesterday— only this time, the proliferation of AI-image-making tools made it easier than ever to sow doubt. Trump is “entering the ‘nothing is true and everything is possible’ phase, as predicted,” the Atlantic contributor Renee DiResta wrote on Threads. “The ability to plausibly cast doubt on the real is the unintended consequence of being able to generate unreality.”
Peter Wehner noticed the same unattractive tendency manifesting as Kamala’s momentum began exploding. “The race,” he wrote, “is now hers to lose… Trump has been disliked by a majority of Americans from almost the moment he ran in 2016, and their misgivings have only deepened as Trump’s behavior has grown more unhinged, narcissistic, and lawless. Biden’s abrupt departure deeply unsettled Trump. His entire campaign was built to defeat Biden. Trump survived an assassination attempt, then met a rapturous reception at the Republican National Convention, and concluded that the race was won. And it was, until Biden stepped aside and Harris stepped up.”
Trump, enraged and rattled, is reverting to his feral ways. We see it in his preposterous claim that Harris’s crowds, which are both noticeably larger and far more enthusiastic than his own, are AI-generated; in his resentful attacks against the popular Republican governor of Georgia, Brian Kemp, and his wife, because Kemp didn’t aid Trump in his effort to overthrow the election; and in his attack on Harris’s racial identity.
At precisely the moment when Trump needs to elevate his performance, to the degree that such a thing is even possible, he’s gone back to his most natural state: erratic, crazed, transgressive, self-indulgent, and enraged. One by-product of this is that Trump has provided no coherent or focused line of attack on Harris. His criticisms are not just vile, but witless. The prospect of not just being beaten, but being beaten by a woman of color, has sent Trump into a frenzy in a way almost nothing else could.
… The contrast with Trump and J. D. Vance, who are dystopian, perennially aggrieved, and weird, to use the adjective of the day, couldn’t be greater.
…The whole landscape of the campaign has been transformed. The rise of Harris instantly cast Trump in a new light. He formerly seemed more ominous and threatening, which, whatever its political drawbacks, signaled strength; now he seems not just old but low-energy, stale, even pathetic. He has become the political version of Fat Elvis.Trump is much better equipped psychologically to withstand ferocious criticisms than he is equipped to withstand mockery. Malignant narcissists go to great lengths to hide their fears and display a false or idealized self. Criticism targets the persona. Mockery, by contrast, can tap very deep fears of being exposed as flawed or weak. When the mask is the target, people with Trump’s psychological profile know how to fight back. Mockery, though, can cause them to unravel.
…Trump will go down in American history as many things, almost all of them poisonous. And the label he most fears is the one he now worries will ever be affixed to him: loser.
Trump will go down in American history as many things, almost all of them poisonous.
yeah. like unprosecuted criminal treasonous insurrectionist. and the poison isn't that he's a criminal... it's that he's never been prosecuted.
Societies always have their share of misanthropic assholes. But only the shittiest societies let them skate on EVERYTHING!!!