I rehash this weather history because it’s not subject to
debate. This is tantamount to Trump declaring black is white or day is night.
It was overcast, and he declared that it was “really sunny.” This disconnect
from reality is my biggest fear about Trump, more than any one policy he has
proposed. My worry is the president of the United States is barking mad.
“More than
anyone else I have ever met,” Tony Schwartz, Trump’s ghostwriter for “The Art
of the Deal,” told the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer at the time, “Trump has the
ability to convince himself that whatever he is saying at any given moment is
true, or sort of true, or at least ought to be true.” My Post colleague
Jennifer Rubin, a conservative blogger, picked up on this theme in an important
post this week, recalling Sen. Ted Cruz’s (R-Tex.) description of Trump as
somebody who “doesn’t know the difference between truth and lies” and “his
response is to accuse everybody else of lying.” Rubin raised the prospect that
Trump might eventually need to be declared unfit to serve under the 25th
Amendment if he can’t “separate what he wants to believe and what exists.”
That’s why
it’s frightening not only that Trump embraces the fantasy that millions voted
illegally but also that he supports the falsehood by citing a Pew Center on the
States report that says nothing about voter fraud — and by claiming pro golfer
Bernhard Langer was turned away from voting in Florida while other,
suspicious-looking people were permitted to cast provisional ballots. Langer, a
German citizen, can’t vote in the United States, and it turns out he witnessed
no such thing.
When Trump
caused international havoc with tweets about China, North Korea and others,
there was speculation that he was pursuing the “madman theory” to unsettle
adversaries by making them think he’s crazy.
He’s doing
such a convincing job of it that I worry that being a madman isn’t Trump’s
theory but his reality.
