Nov 28^th

Mr. Trump is at it again; if a few Arab teens cheer the destruction of the World Trade Center they become “thousands and thousands.” In spite of many news agencies carefully investigating this claim not one was able to find evidence for it. The notoriously belligerent New Jersey Governor Chris Christie refused to suggest that the claim was bogus. That was rather gutless of him, but everyone is afraid of Trump.

Trump will meet today with a group of one hundred Black pastors. He claims the meeting will be to announce their endorsement of his candidacy. Their leader, one Dr. Cindy Trimm, appeared on CNN this morning and claimed that the meeting was not to endorse Trump but to listen to what he had to say. (I’d bet, from Cindy Trimm’s biography that Trump will get that endorsement.)

Then Trump says that he has met Premier Vladimir Putin when they were both on “60 Minutes.” They were indeed on the same program but they were several thousand miles apart so this is a curious definition of “meeting.” Never mind, for Donald Trump it was a meeting if that’s what he wants it to have been.

Trump has his own statistics, some of it taken directly from white supremacy web sites. In one case he copies the information that 81 percent of white murders are perpetrated by blacks; the FBI, which is probably more creditable, claims that 15 percent is closer to the truth.

Donald Trump is gloriously unconcerned with the truth. For Mr. Trump the truth is whatever he says it is. He might not be able to command the seas, or the storms, but he can command the truth because the truth for him is malleable and easily forced to conform to what he wants it to be. Make no mistake here; I do not believe that Trump is lying. I think that Trump truly believes what he is saying in much the same way a psychotic really does hear voices instructing him to take certain actions. I am not suggesting that Trump is psychotic, on the other hand most people are able to separate objective truth from their fantasy world and I’m not sure Trump can do that. What that says about his mental health is for a clinician to say. But then it’s also possible that he is just a consummate con artist who is well aware of the truth and chooses to lie instead.

It doesn’t matter very much which it is. People come to believe what they are told if they are told often enough and told convincingly. The Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels knew that and acted on it quite successfully …for a time. Trump’s followers have come to believe his exaggerations, particularly the fiction that he is a tower of strength and our elected leaders are “weak, very weak.” Here what you see is not what you’ll get!