The first rule of understanding Donald Trump is to understand that Donald lies about everything, all the time. He does it mostly for the purposes of self-aggrandizement, sometimes as a shield to mask his complete lack of knowledge on the subject at hand, and sometimes for no discernible reason at all. The man is a human bullshit bomb. We know this. We've known this since before he descended on his own golden escalator. Somehow the most salient point of the Trump presidency—his status as anti-reality propagandist, flitting between ignorance, incompetence, and delusion—is both commonly understood to be true and not considered, for some reason, a catastrophic failure of democracy.
Wait—we know the reason. The reason is that the Republican Party is itself so corrupted an institution that they have embraced Trump's falsehoods as both election strategy and plan of governance. And because Republicans have declared that Trump telling lies to the American people relentlessly and on all subjects is Good now, and a decades-complacent press corps is reliant on Important Person Says Thing as dominant storytelling device, falsehood-stuffed propaganda is now considered merely an alternative, possibly controversial means of leadership. Might be bad; might be good. We are not allowed to judge.
It's the week before the election, and fact-checkers are still trailing behind Trump's every public appearance attempting to sweep up the shards of whatever the hell he last burped out, never making headway because Trump will repeat them all again hours later to a new audience of cheering gullibles. The New York Times fact checks one of his recent speeches with a nice pretty chart highlighting all of the things that were untrue. It turns out to be a lot! A whole lot!
"A detailed examination of his statements in Janesville by The New York Times found that more than three-quarters of the president’s assertions were either false, misleading, exaggerated, disputed or lacked evidence," sayeth the Times. "Less than a quarter were true."
Other fact-checkers have reported that Trump's use of lies has soared significantly this year as the orange hatepumpkin attempts to gaslight the public into believing a soaring nationwide pandemic is Actually fading, and tariffs being paid by American taxpayers are Actually being paid by foreign nations, and that our military had been reduced to battling our enemies using nothing more than sharp sticks before Actually, Donald came in to buy them new boxes of bullets, causing big, burly soldiers with tears in their eyes to come up to Donald and call him sir.
What the three-quarters number shows, bluntly, is that Trump is reliant on lying as his primary means of getting through his speeches. Or, as the Times puts it, his "falsehoods are the foundation of his campaign rallies and the connective tissue" of his narratives. Trump lies mostly for self-aggrandizement, but also lies because he is so disinterested in governance—or anything else—that it is impossible to drill anything into his thick skull if he doesn't want it there. It is an absolute certainty that Trump's revolving staff have, at multiple points, attempted to explain to him how tariffs work. They have failed, every time.
Whether Trump's fictions are the result of malice or mere dementia is beside the point. He's gotten worse as the stress builds. Whether he wins or loses the election, his post-election claims will ratchet up yet again. He will go into hysterics. He will claim that the whole planet is conspiring against him. He will retain access to the nation's nuclear weapons, because Mike Pence and the rest of Trump's staff wills it.
We're about to enter a new period of mass hysteria. Trump will lie about the election results—whatever they are. Republican Party leaders will back those lies, no matter how egregious. The Republican base, now so addicted to conspiracy theory that the party would come apart at the seams if they were deprived of them, will lash out based on those lies.
For four years, the story has been Republicanism's descent into rank propagandism as means of retaining power—but it has been all but ignored, dwelt on by dedicated media fact-checkers as Trumpian oddity while the rest of politics and press dodges its uncomfortable implications. The press has been betting, if only out of laziness, that it will collapse with no damage done; Republicans themselves believe they still have the option to abandon fascist techniques if straddling them at some point proves too damaging.
It will all come to a head next week. Republicans have doubled down on Trump's approach time after time after time, immunizing him from both crimes and basic standards of decency. The lying was the point, back when politicians and press were asked to back up their claims of inherent virtue with action. Now the lying has become a form of governance unto itself, and the election a referendum as to whether Americans will be governed by facts or by fiat.