Trump lies about everything big and small. He lies about things he said two minutes after he said them to the same person. He’s lied about everything he’s ever done in his life, often projecting his own sins and failings on others, and dismissed any facts to the contrary he’s presented with. No one believes anything he says anymore.
The one thing, however, that has always been taken at face value is his claim that he doesn’t drink, in part because he watched his brother drink himself to death. But what if this is the biggest lie of all? What if his rages, his slurring and inability to read off a teleprompter, his memory lapses and incoherence, his laziness and executive time, his all-concealing orange makeup, whatever the lighting, can all be explained not by some array of psychological ailments but by the fact that he’s in the bag by lunchtime?
I don’t know. Don Jr apparently drank himself into a stupor in college because he knew it would annoy his supposedly tee-totaling father, which sounds pretty on brand for Don Jr. But alcoholism also runs in families, so drinking could just be on brand for the Trumps. Don Jr’s no less a liar so maybe he was just showing up Trump’s own lie. Certainly a father who berates his son for not wearing a suit to a football game isn’t going to reveal that he’s no less a drinker. And if Trump’s brother only drank because his father wanted him to be the heir and he couldn’t take the abuse, maybe Trump drank too for the same reason, just more successfully. In his mid-70s, Trump would be reeling from the effects of a lifetime of liquor, which explains the clear difference between how he spoke and acted decades ago and now. But I don’t know.