Trump’s Wild Lies Down the Election Homestretch Are Not Crazy

• Mark Follman
• National Affairs Editor Bio | Follow

Mother Jones illustration; Chris Kleponis/CNP/Zuma

WN: But what about his crazed cultic followers?! Of whom I have two close relatives . . . Deplorables, yes! But what else? . . .

excerpts:

What can seem like dizzying insanity is by design. If you aren’t among the minority of Americans subscribing to the Trump cult, then he wants you to give up. When people are constantly pummeled with confusion, conflict, and outrage, some will stop paying attention and check out. There’s work to do, bills to pay, kids to Zoom-school, a raging pandemic to worry about. It can feel like it’s not worth the effort needed to sort out what’s true or false. Meanwhile, repeated lies gain traction. With the vague sense that everything is an unpleasant mess, then maybe some people won’t even bother to vote, especially with Republicans working overtime to make that fundamental right more difficult.

Trump may well be a dangerous psychopath, but he isn’t crazy. He doesn’t spread lunatic conspiracy theories because he believes them. Not for a moment does he actually think that Joe Biden secretly arranged the murder of Navy SEALs in a scheme to stage the takedown of Osama bin Laden. When Trump shared those claims recently on Twitter, his motivation was, as always, to provoke, entertain, confuse, “trigger the libs,” and change the subject from his own failures. Never mind that a pro-Trump Navy SEAL who was on the bin Laden mission openly called BS on Trump’s trolling. By the time NBC anchor Savannah Guthrie asked the president during last Thursday night’s town hall why he would spread such bizarre and baseless material, he wouldn’t give an inch.

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These moments were not simply “bonkers” or reason for a CNN anchor to ask, “What the actual F?” The incoherence and provocation were the point. Trump knows that flooding the internet and airwaves with misinformation and outrage-bait helps to distract from the authentically hideous stories: His catastrophic dereliction of duty in the face of the coronavirus pandemic. His attempts to poison the voting process at the heart of American democracy. The revelations that he cheated the system and paid essentially nothing in federal income taxes. His long-running, increasingly dangerous courtship with violent far-right hate groups. And don’t look now, but his poll numbers are pretty grim too.

Please click on: Trump’s Exponentially Evil Game Plan!