This occurred to me last night when reading about and listening to the debate as to whether the media should label Trump’s falsehoods as lies.
It goes without saying among rational and unbiased people that Trump has expressed a variety of falsehoods. I broke them down into three primary types, deliberate lies, delusional falsehoods, and lies coming from the conspiracy media. We could add untruths that come from ignorance, and are politically convenient, like his expressed opinions about hacking. I thought of a yet another category.
It is possible that at times he is relating something he dreamed about. I don’’t mean a daydream. I mean a vivid, realistic nighttime dream.
He may, for example, have had such a dream about thousands Muslims cheering the fall of the World Trade Center from across the river in New Jersey.
Consider how he expressed this.
Arguing that there are terrorist sympathizers in the United States, Donald Trump says he saw "thousands" of New Jerseyans celebrating after the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.
"I watched when the World Trade Center came tumbling down," the Republican presidential candidate said at a Nov. 21 rally in Birmingham, Ala. "And I watched in Jersey City, N.J., where thousands and thousands of people were cheering as that building was coming down. Thousands of people were cheering."
The next day, ABC This Week host George Stephanopoulos asked Trump if he misspoke, noting that "the police say that didn't happen."
Trump -- who has said he was in his Manhattan apartment the morning of the attack -- doubled down.
"It was on television. I saw it," Trump said. "It was well covered at the time, George. Now, I know they don't like to talk about it, but it was well covered at the time. There were people over in New Jersey that were watching it, a heavy Arab population, that were cheering as the buildings came down. Not good.” www.politifact.com/...
This is so patently untrue, so easily proved not to have happened, that it has remained one of his most puzzling statements.
The lie that propelled Trump into the national political spotlight and led to the coining of the term “birtherism” may originally have come from a conspiracy website; but this was not easily proven false for those who wanted to delegitimize President Obama. Early on I think Trump realized this story “had legs” and was not going to be easy to disprove even if Obama released a copy of his original birth certificate. This came to pass and it was immediately labeled a forgery by the conspiracy media.
Add all these possibilities up and we truly have a new field for my learned colleagues in the field of psychology and psychoanalysis to study: Trumpology.