Splitsville EL GRAN LOCO DEL MAR-A-LAGO

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Here at Splitsville, we regularly experience amusement/consolation/nausea by thinking of ways our country is really two countries—i.e., a pair of nations, or tribes, or whatever, co-existing within a single geo-political entity. Because we’re really into the old saying about how the world consists of two kinds of people: those who know the old saying about how the world consists of two kinds of people, and those who don’t.

Actually, that’s not an old saying. It’s a new saying. We just made it up. But it’s true! Or at least we sincerely believe it is. And, speaking of something being true, we’ve found a new way to dichotomize our native land, about which former (Nixon) Vice-President and notably corrupt Republican Spiro T. Agnew once said, “The United States, for all its faults, is still the greatest nation in the country.” (See? A nation in the country! Splitsville!)

Where were we? Oh, yeah. We’re talking—because you knew it would inevitably come down to this—about Donald J. Trump’s sanity.

Will Saletan, over at The Bulwark, recently ran a succinct, taut piece about this topic. If we tell you its title, can you guess his opinion about its subject? The title is “Donald Trump is Delusional.” It starts off with a bang:

Among the reality-based community—those of us who acknowledge Donald Trump’s prodigious history of false statements—there’s a longstanding debate. Some think Trump knows better and is simply lying. Others think he’s sincerely delusional.

Trump’s latest sitdown interview, taped on Sunday with Bret Baier and aired at length by Fox News on Monday, strongly supports the delusionality theory. And that’s bad news for America and the world.

Having repeatedly written, over the years, about Trump’s relentless and shameless mendacity, we can confirm the perennial relevance of this debate. And, while it’s always been obvious that Trump lies about literally everything (one “tell” attesting to this fact is the little thought balloon that congeals over Trump’s head every time he speaks, containing the message, “I AM MAKING THIS SHIT UP.”), it has never been clear whether he knows the lies are made up and false or he trooly believes the lies are trooly true.

(It’s worth inserting here that neither case is exculpatory. A nasty asshole deliberately spreading vicious lies, or a nasty asshole sincerely proclaiming vicious lies, is still a nasty, vicious asshole.)

Saletan runs down a series of Trump’s assertions in the Baier interview, starting with the, uh, Big Lie:

For years, the lie/delusion debate has centered on the 2020 election: Does Trump really think he won it, or does he know his tales of massive fraud are bogus? In the Fox interview, Trump seethed as he repeated his debunked allegations. “If the election weren’t rigged, this would have never happened,” he fumed, referring to various bad events of the last four years. “Let’s see whether or not Fox lets you put that in, okay? If the election weren’t rigged. You hear me? Rigged.”

But there’s more to come: Trump’s claims of “fraud” at the U.S. Agency for International Development. His contention that the ginormous, budget-busting shortfall of revenue that would result from making the 2017 tax cuts permanent would be compensated for by tariffs. Saletan notes that this is particularly “nuts,” and says that if Trump were merely lying, he wouldn’t actually go and impose those tariffs—which he has indeed started to roll out.

And, of course, “Trump launched into his now-routine riff that Canadians would be happier if they surrendered their independence and joined the USA—ignoring polls that show Canadians overwhelmingly oppose the idea.”

This last claim reminds us of something that always puzzled us as we fended off the 30,000 lies of his first term: Why lie in the first place? Many of the lies were easily debunked; still more, even if left unchallenged and accepted as true, brought him no benefit. This is why we’ve always thought of him as being pathological. He can’t not lie—unless under the extreme duress of, say, being forced to be deposed under oath. There is footage of such a thing, taken years ago, in which Trump looks cowed, fearful, and hesitant, like a political prisoner being forced, at gunpoint, to make a hostage video.

That question—why?—applies to all of Trump’s recent fantasies. Why go on and on about “buying Greenland,” or committing the outright war crime of ethnically cleansing Gaza so that you can “own” it, if you’re just telling fibs and don’t really mean it? In the words of (who else?) George Costanza’s mother, “what is to be GAINED” by harping on these absurdities?

Saletan:

This isn’t the way you talk if you’re just a liar. You don’t threaten and needlessly infuriate your neighbors and allies. You don’t bet your country’s economy on trade wars. You don’t double down on ethnic-cleansing fantasies involving massive American financial commitments, much less “ownership.”

Saletan concludes that Trump is “not saying things he knows are false or preposterous. He really believes this lunacy. He’s deranged.” We agree. And even if you posit that, for most of his life, Trump did know the difference between what was plausible and what was nuts, and so knew that his lies were lies, that seems no longer to be the case. Just as the internet is (according to former Senator Ted Stevens, doofus Republican of Alaska) a series of tubes, so is Trump’s brain. Think of it as like a pneumatique, shuttling canisters of information from one department to another. What we have now, in the mind of the President of the Just Barely United States, is a complete collapse of the Reality Check Department. Either the department has been abandoned or the tubes leading into and out of it don’t work. In any case, ideas produced in the What I Want Department are now routed directly to the Things I Believe to Be True Department.

Why does any of this matter? Sure, he’ll just keep lying and fantasizing, regardless of what we conclude is his actual epistemological state. But his ideas are ridiculous. Ludicrous. Demented. Doesn’t that fact alone guarantee that they’ll go nowhere?

Sadly, no. Trump not only has the power of his office, but he is surrounded by a huge gang of yes-men, yes-women, lackies, and toads, all of whom will be happy—indeed, eager—to take his every lunatic notion seriously. Second, our awful Supreme Court has given him all-but-unchecked power. Third, the GOP has demonstrated repeatedly that it is too corrupt, stupid, or scared to bring him (let alone Elon Musk) to heel. Fourth, some of the nation’s richest corporations, controlled by some of the nation’s richest humans, are rushing to “obey in advance.” (Hello, Gulf of America on Google Maps!)

Fifth, his condition can only get worse.

And so we face a future in which a delusional malignant narcissist, with almost unlimited power and even more unlimited money, will feel increasingly free to have, nurture, and demand the realization of ideas conceived in the service of greed, vanity, lust, and hate. If he wants to create a concentration camp in Gitmo, he’ll do it. If he wants to get a horse and promote it to be Senator, he’ll do it. If he wants to send the U.S. military to invade Greenland, and dare Denmark (and NATO!) to oppose him, he’ll do it.

Or he’ll try. And whether these and other maniac plans succeed or not, people will be harmed, institutions will suffer, and life in Splitsville will devolve into a clash between two warring nations: those who are all gung-ho to pretend that Trump has a functional brain, and to support the twisted work products of that brain; and those to whom it is obvious how far gone he is and are prepared to fight to keep his psychopathological cogitations from mutilating the world.

Nota Bene: We’re going analogue—i.e., preparing a book-length, book-like book edition of The Split you will be able to purchase with your own money, hold in your very hands, and read with your own two eyes. Watch this space for further exciting news.