We’re not even 100 hours into the Trump presidency and he has uttered a string of foolish, sophomoric lies on mostly trivial subjects, ones that, oddly and pathologically, matter only to him. In other words, whoever had January 21 or 22 in the pool on when this guy would start acting presidential lost. And the rest of the month is not looking any more promising.
Among this weekend’s presidential proclamations:
• There were 1.5 million people at his inauguration, the largest inaugural crowd ever. There were actually about 250,000 people there, dwarfing the 2009 Obama inauguration which drew 1.8 million. The new president’s fabrication became an instant meme; even the Jumbotron at a Dallas hockey game got into the act by flashing, “Tonight’s Attendance: 1.5 Million!”
• After a few rain drops fell at the start of his speech, President Trump said “God looked down and he said we’re not going to let it rain on your speech. The truth is it stopped immediately.” (This was, by the way, the first recorded report of God ever referring to Himself with a plural pronoun.) According to the Washington Post and the National Weather Service, the rain continued during the first several minutes of Trump’s speech.
• The President reported that as soon as he finished his speech, there was a pounding downpour. That simply did not happen according to weather authorities.
• President Trump told career intelligence staffers at the Central Intelligence Agency Saturday that the news media totally fabricated a report that he had been critical of their work. Days earlier, Trump’s own tweets had compared CIA employees to Nazis and made fun of them for having been wrong about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
This singularly bizarre presidential behavior on Trump’s part should come as no surprise, although it will for anyone who held out hope that, somehow, the oath of office would transform him from a narcissistic combatant into a more serious statesperson. After all, against all odds and predictions, Trump now holds the most important job in the free world. Why is he still acting like an insecure adolescent, obsessed with constantly proving himself? The answer would fill a PhD dissertation, and I’m sure several are already in progress.
Unfortunately, unless his staff finds a way of reigning him in, – and prospects for that are extremely low – we will have to adjust to a new normal: a president totally lacking in basic leadership skills. Google the subject and you will immediately find thousands of treatises on the necessity of leaders establishing credibility and being selective in picking their battles (here, here and here). That is foreign terrain to our new president. The size of the inauguration crowd does not matter one iota. If 12 people or 12 million people had showed up, his presidential powers remain the same. Spending the first 50 hours of his presidency in a urination contest over crowd sizes and weather reports makes no strategic sense, particularly when the news media has hard evidence of his falsehoods.
The problem, of course, goes well beyond the immediate issue of crowd counts and weather patterns. What happens when the president’s words really matter? What if he’s talking about the number of American casualties in battle? Or the substance of a trade agreement? Or how many people are without health insurance? Trump’s disregard for the truth is pathological, meaning he lies constantly, whether he needs to or not. The New York Times reported a story from Trump butler Anthony Senecal, who said the president once told someone that the nursery tiles at Mar-a-Lago were made by Walt Disney. Senecal told Trump that was not true. His boss’ response? “Who cares?”
Daniel Gilbert, a Harvard University psychologist, wrote a fascinating book explaining the cognitive process that causes some people to, in effect, create a false reality and believe it is true. In his book, “Stumbling on Happiness,” Gilbert laid out such a thought process. A person knowingly exaggerates an observation to match a fantasy or an expectation. Most people, he said, then differentiate between the fantasy and the actual situation. But some, Gilbert writes, repeat the exaggeration so often that they come to believe it.
Mix that scenario with what Trump, in his autobiography, “The Art of the Deal,” called “truthful hyperbole,” and you have a recipe for converting the imagination into reality. Here is what Trump wrote in that book: “People may not always think big themselves, but they can still get very excited by those who do. That’s why a little hyperbole never hurts. People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular. I call it truthful hyperbole. It’s an innocent form of exaggeration—and a very effective form of promotion.”
Its innocence, however, quickly dissipates when you lose the ability to distinguish reality from fantasy, particularly when your job description includes access to the nuclear codes. Hang onto your seats. This is going to be a long, bumpy ride.