On the bright side, the Trump era has doubtless reinforced the age-old nostrum that in America, absolutely anyone can be president. Shallow, unread and uninterested, fundamentally infantile and deeply narcissistic, Donald Trump’s enduring lesson to America is this: just say anything.
And say anything Mr. Trump has. The Carnival Barker-in-Chief broke the BS-Counter with some 30,000 falsehoods before his presidency came to a close, according to exhausted Washington Post fact-checkers. But give him this: He hasn’t missed a beat since then. In his “press conference” last week, the former president made at least 162 false or exaggerated statements in 64 minutes, according to National Public Radio, which is a pretty impressive clip.
So when it comes to The Lying Game, Donald Trump still has his fastball. In other respects, not so much, because it doesn’t take a neurologist to discern some serious slippage. President Joe Biden stammers and rushes words together or drops them altogether in an attempt to suppress his stutter.
But Donald Trump makes Joe Biden look like Cicero, and more than that, Biden isn’t bonkers. It is increasingly clear that the same cannot be said of Trump.
Recently, Trump launched into a stunningly incoherent disquisition about how brilliant he was for wondering about the different ways he could die if a boat he was on went down. “It must be because of MIT, my relationship with MIT, very smart,” he babbled. “I say: What would happen if the boat sank from its weight, and you have this tremendously powerful battery, and the battery is now underwater, and there’s a shark approximately 10 yards over there. By the way, lot of shark attacks lately. Did you notice that? Do I get electrocuted or do I jump over by the shark?”
Upset by the size of Kamala Harris’ crowds, Trump asserts that she has used artificial intelligence to create false images of crowds that he claims didn’t exist. “Has anyone noticed that Kamala CHEATED at the airport?” he posted. “There was nobody at the plane and she ‘AI-d’ it, and showed a massive ‘crowd’ of so-called followers. BUT THEY DIDN’T EXIST.”
So he made up some hogwash about his own crowds, maintaining that no one — that’s right, no one — has had bigger crowds than him. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I have a dream” speech before 250,000? Trump claimed that more people came to hear him encourage an insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021. “Same real estate, same everything — same number of people,” he explained. “If not, we had more.”
Trump also concocted a phony near-death experience with former California Assembly Speaker Willie Brown, who once dated Harris, in order to invent a fictional conversation in which Brown criticized Harris. “I know Willie Brown very well,” Trump dissembled. “In fact, I went down in a helicopter with him. We thought maybe this is the end.” The only problem: it never happened.
Harris has clearly set Trump’s teeth on edge, and not only his teeth. “I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago, when she happened to turn Black,” Trump told a group of Black journalists, “and now she wants to be known as Black.”
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Then there was Cheerios-Gate, Trump’s unintentionally hilarious attempt at his posh New Jersey estate to project empathy with ordinary Americans about grocery prices. “I haven’t seen Cheerios in a long time,” Trump riffed in a rare truthful declaratory sentence, gesturing to a table stacked with cereal boxes. “I think I’m going to take some of them back to my cottage and have a lot of fun.”
The good news is that, with age, Donald Trump’s idea of fun back at the cottage has mellowed since his Stormy Daniels days. But when he speaks, Americans don’t know whether to be struck more by his mendacity or by his doddering. In America, being a liar is forgivable. Being a geezer is not.
Seeming weird is a problem. But what Trump really seems is out to lunch, and it doesn’t look as though he’s coming back.
Jeff Robbins’ latest book, “Notes From the Brink: A Collection of Columns about Policy at Home and Abroad,” is available now on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple Books and Google Play.
