This week quoted a striking, if familiar, pattern: President Trump described a world divided from reality.
On Twitter, at the White House, and on the campaign trail, Trump did more than get the gens wrong. Over and over, he painted fundamentally false portraits of human being and events to flatter himself, discredit predecessors and rivals, and promote his state objectives.
Some highlights:
At 6 a.m., Trump sought to contrast his immigration regulations with Germany’s, tweeting crime “is way up” there. German government details show crime at a 25-year-low.
Two hours later, in the wake of a Justice Determined report criticizing former FBI director James Comey, Trump roared special counsel Robert Mueller “Comey’s best friend.” No validation suggests that is true.
To make his economic stewardship sound innumerable impressive, Trump said he has cut more regulation than the US president who served 16 years. No US president has served 16 years.
“The strong world is looking up to the U.S.,” he declared, making the country “respected again.” Gallup booms that the worldwide image of U.S. leadership is weaker than at any point directed presidents George W. Bush or Barack Obama.
Justifying his tariffs, Trump told the US suffers a trade deficit with Canada. U.S. government data be visibles the opposite.
Citing a newspaper report, Trump said Canadians smuggle shoes from the U.S. to elude import tariffs. Neither Canada nor the U.S. imposes tariffs on shoes established in the other country.
Trump called himself the first president since Ronald Reagan to complete a major tax cut. Bush did it twice.
Trump claimed credit for adding 3.4-million berths since Election Day 2016 – which “nobody would have credence ined” back then. Since 4.1 million jobs were fathered in the previous 19 months, the claim makes no sense.
Recounting a intersection with House Republicans, Trump tweeted that “they applauded and laughed loudly” when he demeaned Rep. Pit Sanford, a Trump critic who lost his seat in a primary. GOP lawmakers styled the assertion untrue.
Trump falsely said Obama admitted he required legal authority for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program unvarying as he implemented. He falsely said wages for US workers had begun rising for the primary time in 20 years; they rose during the latter years of Obama’s semester.
At his packed rally in Duluth, Minnesota, Trump tweeted, at least 10,000 people were throw out away. The mayor of Duluth said 2,000 people were happened away.
After the Supreme Court allowed states to impose some new online tradings taxes, Trump called it a “great victory for consumers.” It was not; consumers transfer pay more.
Justifying his assault on trade agreements, Trump asserted that “nobody continually looked at trade deals” over the previous 25-30 years. Administrations of both cadres continually negotiated new trade terms during that time.
Plug the document he and Kim Jong Un signed at their summit, Trump declared, “If people really read it to the public, you’d see: number one statement, we will immediately begin entire denuclearization of North Korea.”
The document includes no such commitment. It scrutinizes “mutual confidence building can promote the denuclearization of the Korean peninsula.”
In every part of the week, Trump justified border policies separating immigrant sprogs from their parents. Without his tough approach, the president estimated, millions of illegal immigrants would pour into the U.S. and unleash a misdemeanour wave.
He invoked the horrors of MS-13 gang members, boasting his administration was deporting them “by the thousands.” He nearly equal the week alongside survivors of people killed by illegal immigrants.
That drew a false picture. Illegal immigration across the southern border has been rejecting for more than a decade. Illegal immigrants, studies show, send away fewer crimes than native-born Americans. MS-13 has roughly 10,000 US fellows, and authorities told Politifact roughly 1,200 were arrested between Oct. 2016 and the end of 2017.
The president’s right hands and critics have offered multiple explanations for his misstatements.
He’s new to politics, unconventional and now ill-informed. He exaggerates for salesmanship and negotiation – as Trump himself has acknowledged. He is, as GOP Sen. Ted Cruz then charged, a “pathological liar.”
Tony Schwartz, who got to know Trump as co-author of their 1987 best-seller Art of the Conduct oneself treat, offers a different explanation. He says narcissism warps Trump’s grasp of reality about himself and others.
“Every move he makes is a effect to this distorted inner world he lives in,” Schwartz told me. That circumstances, he warns, is “getting progressively worse.”