Donald Trump in the Multiverse of Lies
In a social media post only slightly more unhinged than most, Donald Trump responded to James Comey posting an image of seashells on the beach that he hilariously chose to interpret as a serious threat on his life by vomiting up a sloppy stew of accusations, including, “Remember, it all began with DIRTY COP James Comey, Obama, a hapless and cognitively impaired Sleepy Joe Biden, and my now very famous ACCUSATION that,“THEY SPIED ON MY CAMPAIGN!”
If any other president were to accuse a predecessor of spying on them, it would be taken seriously. When Trump took to social media to rail against Obama’s imaginary illegal surveillance, it was rightly written off as the paranoid, delusional ravings of an emotionally stunted madman.
I wondered why Trump would choose to highlight a conspiracy theory that never got traction because there was obviously no substance to it. Like so much of what Trump says, it didn’t reflect reality but rather Trump’s delusional sense of himself as a Christ-like savior of democracy, Christianity, and western civilization beset on all sides by Marxist America-haters who will do anything to stop him.
I had an epiphany that helps explain why Trump would recycle a golden oldie like Obama illegally spying on him in the greatest political scandal of all time, and why he seems to be living in a different world than the rest of us.
Trump does not live in our world. He lives instead in a multiverse of lies where every impossible, far-fetched conspiracy theory that he has promoted is true. In Trump’s multiverse of lies, if he says something, it automatically becomes true.
In this weird alternate universe, Obama wiretapped Trump because Trump said so. That’s all the evidence he or his cultists need.
Of COURSE, Trump’s very valid concerns about illegal surveillance weren’t covered by the lamestream media. Of COURSE, Obama wasn’t investigated, arrested, and then imprisoned or executed for treason. The Deep State conspired against him!
Trump’s multiverse has new additions daily, but nothing is ever removed. You or I might change our opinions or beliefs after receiving new, relevant information. That is not true of Trump.
Take the Central Park 5. Trump felt so strongly that he wrote a vaguely fascist ad calling for the death penalty for the teenagers of color and a loving return to a time when people weren’t so hung up on “police brutality” and let the cops do their jobs.
The Central Park 5 were exonerated in the eyes of the law and the public. Seemingly, the only person who didn’t concede that a miscarriage of justice had been committed was Trump.
Trump never wavered. Trump never wavers. If something seems true to him, then it is true, and no amount of evidence is going to change that.
To Trump, James Comey is evil because he was part of what he calls the Russia Hoax. That’s all the proof Trump needs that when the avuncular sixty-four-year-old former FBI director, George H.W. Bush appointee and longtime Republican, posted a picture of shells on Instagram reading “86 47,” it was a serious threat on the president’s life.
If the government had paid attention to the picture Lee Harvey Oswald sent Life magazine of pretty rocks spelling out, “Blow Away JFK,” a tragedy could have been averted.
In Trump’s headcanon, the sixty-something father of six took to a social media site known for thirst traps and cute cats to encourage the assassination of the current inhabitant of the White House.
It doesn’t matter, of course, that this interpretation is comically implausible. Trump has already made it a reality by sternly asserting that it’s true without providing evidence. This, in turn, led his administration to repeat the absurd fiction that a corny senior citizen is a Molotov cocktail-throwing extremist publicly agitating for political violence.
When Trump says that a lot of people are saying that Comey is a crazed killer Commie, he can point to himself and underlings terrified of becoming the target of his incoherent rage. That’s all he needs. He doesn’t need proof. He doesn’t need confirmation. If he wants DIRTY COP Comey to have committed even more unforgivable crimes against him, then he can have it, as a treat.
Trump’s assertion that James Comey was trying to get him killed through seashell art—the most dangerous medium of all—made it into the multiverse of lies, where it mixes and mingles and overlaps with other pro-Trump, anti-everyone-else conspiracy theories.
I’m talking specifically about Trump’s recent contention that Bruce Springsteen and Beyonce, both of whom have hundreds of millions of dollars, were illegally bribed to endorse Democratic candidates who embody the values they have long espoused.
It just doesn’t make sense, to Trump, for Democratic musicians to support Democratic candidates. There must be something sinister and illegal happening behind the scenes to explain it.
On Truth Social, angry grandpa yell-screamed, “According to news reports, Beyoncé was paid $11,000,000 to walk onto a stage, quickly ENDORSE KAMALA, and walk off to loud booing for never having performed, NOT EVEN ONE SONG! Remember, the Democrats and Kamala illegally paid her millions of Dollars for doing nothing other than giving Kamala a full-throated ENDORSEMENT. THIS IS AN ILLEGAL ELECTION SCAM AT THE HIGHEST LEVEL! IT IS AN ILLEGAL CAMPAIGN CONTRIBUTION! BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN, OPRAH, BONO AND, PERHAPS, MANY OTHERS, HAVE A LOT OF EXPLAINING TO DO!!!”
It saddens me that Trump is one of those codgers who can’t delineate between an AI-powered fake news page/site with a name like PatriotsPost or American4God and legitimate news. It enrages me that he’d probably consider a cynical engagement farm pitched at his most gullible supporters preferable and less biased than, say, The New York Times.
None of this shit happened. When a performer like Springsteen or Beyoncé does a benefit for a political candidate, their employees get paid. That’s the law. Springsteen’s roadies, guitar techs, and personal assistants don’t have to work for free because he’s playing a show supporting Biden, Obama, or Kamala Harris. The superstars don’t receive financial compensation for their endorsements. They also don’t need to be bribed. They’re billionaires, or nearly billionaires.
BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN, OPRAH, BONO, AND, PERHAPS, MANY OTHERS, do not have a lot of explaining to do because their “ILLEGAL ELECTION SCAM AT THE HIGHEST LEVEL!” isn’t illegal, or a scam, or even remotely unethical. It’s just a matter of famous people expressing support for politicians Trump dislikes.
It is nevertheless canonical in Donald Trump’s multiverse of lies that Beyonce accepted an eleven million dollar bribe to endorse Harris.
There’s a self-sustaining element to these obvious fibs. Trump announces that he’s going to launch a “major investigation” into the non-existent problem of celebrities accepting massive amounts of money to pretend they strongly prefer a candidate other than himself. That makes the story newsworthy, which fuels his sense that he’s discovered something real and relevant, and alarming, when he’s just spouting more nonsense. If the president says something, it is inherently newsworthy, and Trump isn't capable of not lying egregiously. That means that his lies are news, and if Trump sees something that he agrees with on the news, he is going to amplify it, particularly if it’s one of his lies.
To cite recent examples, when Trump invited the President of South Africa to the White House, he ambushed him with a racist bullshit video about a non-existent genocide of white farmers, then shoved papers from fake news sites supporting his contention that racism is a terrible injustice that only affects Asians and caucasians. It doesn’t matter to Trump that he got his information wrong; what matters is that he confidently expressed horror that white landowners were being slaughtered en masse on television, so it must be true.
Would Trump’s social media site be called Truth Social if everything that Trump said didn’t magically become true because he said it?
Karoline Leavitt recently responded to criticism that Trump was exploiting the presidency to scam tens of millions from followers through NFTs and crypto scams and meme coins and gold watches by repeating the adorable fiction that Trump had a perfect life as the world’s most successful billionaire and family man but decided to give it all up out of a sense of Christ-like selflessness and devotion. The idea that a great humanitarian like Trump would even consider sullying his presidency through greed or crass self-interest is laughable. Leavitt said it, and it made Trump happy, so it must be true.
There are many falsehoods in Trump’s multiverse of lies. None is more important or sacrosanct than the almost universally disproven theory that the 2020 presidential election was stolen, depriving him and his followers of the sacred landslide victory they deserved.
For Trump, this is the original sin. It would be an exaggeration to say that everything Trump rages about can be traced to his false belief that he’s been elected three times, but only two of them counted. However, it would not be hyperbolic to say that many, if not most, of Trump’s grudges can be traced back to the 2020 presidential election.
For the president, there are only two levels of importance when it comes to controversies. It’s either not important, or EASILY THE GREATEST SCANDAL IN POLITICAL HISTORY.
That’s why Trump has consistently deems every minor annoyance and micro-agression as THE GREATEST SCANDAL IN POLITICAL HISTORY.
But there’s one greatest scandal in political history that stands out above all others. That is, of course, the 2020 election.
Trump sees Biden’s election in 2020 as a massive crime committed by a variety of sketchy and disreputable players, primarily Democrats.
In Trump’s mind, Joe Biden and the entire Democratic Party illegally colluded to rob Trump of a second term despite knowing that he won decisively, in a landslide even more massive than his (checks notes) 1.5 percent victory in the popular vote in 2024. Trump blathers nonsensically about everything he doesn’t like being illegal and unethical, and something that needs to be investigated because he sees the opposition party as so corrupt and unfair to him that their continued existence represents a crime.
For Trump, Democrats don’t just commit egregious crimes; they ARE inherently illegal and unethical because they perpetrated the fiction that Joe Biden beat Trump. Trump sees Biden’s campaign and victory as a criminal endeavor, and everyone who assisted him as accomplices who belong in jail.
That’s one of the reasons he loves to call the Bidens a crime family: it implicates them in the crime of not handing the presidency off to Trump in 2020 when he felt that he had earned it.
The great cover-up of 2020 doesn’t just implicate radical left Democrats. Its slithery tentacles reach everywhere, from mainstream media that refused to report that he had been re-elected in a landslide to social media that banned him temporarily after the January 9th kerfluffle, to Mike Pence.
In Trump’s vivid imagination, Pence had an opportunity to prevent a great evil by refusing to certify Joe Biden as the next president. Pence could have prevented the greatest crime of all time and promised four more years of peace and perfection but was too chickenshit to embrace his heroic destiny.
Trump is wrong about just about everything, with the notable exception of Biden’s cognitive decline. Seeing everything through the prism of 2020 makes Trump’s verbiage more understandable. Everything about it was illegal, unethical, and wrong.
That helps explain why Trump just shared a series of AI-created QAnon memes calling for military tribunals where villains like Obama will finally be punished with death for committing the treasonous act of denying Trump his rightful political victory.
Trump thinks that everyone even tangentially involved in the 2020 presidential election is part of a cover-up and a conspiracy that, like all enduring conspiracies, is impossibly vast and far-ranging.
Conspiracy theories need conspiracy theorists to spread misinformation. That’s why Trump’s cultists fuel his delusion that he won when he clearly lost. They share his rage and fierce hunger to punish the many people he holds responsible for the worst thing to happen since Jesus’ crucifixion. The only truth they believe are the voluminous falsehoods of a pathological liar.
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