Update: What does Trump believe about being reinstated as president? Even Snopes can’t figure it out.
Amanda Marcotte thinks Trump is crazy like a fox.
Marcotte concluded essentially that Trump is not crazy. Rather, he is crazy like the proverbial fox plotting to sneak into the henhouse.
So no, I don't think Trump believes he'll be reinstated in August. I don't think Trump really believes anything, not in the way that most people hold beliefs at least. He has a purely instrumentalized view of the world: "Beliefs" aren't sincerely held, but just another tool to manipulate others. He never asks himself "is this true?" so much as "what will it get me to say this?" And when it comes to this particular conspiracy theory, the answer may sadly be "quite a lot."
In The Wall Street Journal Charles C.W. Cooke suggests he is just plain crazy:
National Review’s Charles C. W. Cooke reports: “I can attest, from speaking to an array of different sources, that Donald Trump does indeed believe quite genuinely that he — along with former senators David Perdue and Martha McSally — will be ‘reinstated’ to office….”
Enlarge above
Of course the Wall Street Journal is conservative so they are not about to criticize Trump for doing things they approve of. Still when a conservative like Cooke wonders about Trump’s sanity (“unmoored from the real world”) we have to take it seriously.
To acknowledge that Trump is living in a fantasy world does not wipe out his achievements or render anything else he has said incorrect. It does not endorse Joe Biden or hand the Republican Party over to Bill Kristol or knock down an inch of the wall on the border. It merely demands that Donald Trump be treated like any other person: subject to gravity, open to rebuttal, and liable to be laughed at when he becomes so unmoored from the real world that it is hard to know where to begin in attempting to explain him.
On MSNBC, interviewed by Lawrence O’Donnell the other night, psychiatrist Lance Dodes came down on the side of Trump being delusional, in other words straight up crazy.
This morning as I was writing this on MSNBC Philip Bump discussed The Wall Street Journal piece by Cooke with Ali Velshi and asked the essential question: “what does Trump actually believe?”
Perhaps I don’t want to give Trump credit for being as devious as Amanda Marcotte thinks he is when she subtitled her article “Trump's conspiracy theories aren't delusional, they are aspirational — and so far, they are working for him” and writes:
Trump uses wild conjecture to project images of what he wants the world to look like, and passively allows his minions — whether they are close to him, like Rudy Giuliani, or worship him from afar, like the Capital rioters — to self-direct the actions they will take in order to make his fantasy a reality.
On Thursday I came down on the side of Trump being truly “crazy” in the clinical sense when I wrote:
www.dailykos.com/...
When Trump isn't reinstalled as president in August (or whenever Mr. Pillow tells him he will be) his primitive psychological defense of denial may shatter.* Florid psychosis (also called a psychotic episode) could include actual experiencing hallucinations, delusions, and expressing paranoid fears in his pronouncements when he starts having rallies again. He could repeat the most outlandish QAnon beliefs and even embellish on them.
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The Trump denouement could be a blatant psychotic episode that would be hard if not impossible to excuse or ignore as simply Trump being Trump. I’d like to paraphrase Justice Potter Stewart’s famous phrase about knowing obscenity when he sees it, and say that most people know crazy when they see it.
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Today’s diary was inspired by an f-word laden piece (which I recommend reading) in “The Bulwark” by conservative Charlie Sykes,
I Regret to Inform You where he writes “here’s a reality check” followed by this tweet:
Sykes then writes in bold:
In other words: a clown with a flamethrower still has a flamethrower.
I think he means “clown” to be interpreted as someone who is actually delusional, not crazy like a fox with all it’s devious faculties intact, but a demented fox that wouldn’t know a henhouse from a Portland beerhouse.
Either way, pity the hapless foxes.
Alas, we are the foxes.
