Trump's Rejection of Observable Reality

[babylonsister]

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/11/trump-access-hollywood-sexual-assault-gaslighting/546770/

Trump's Rejection of Observable Reality
The president’s acceptance of Roy Moore’s denials, and his own reported doubts about the Access Hollywood tape, again raise questions about his relationship with empiricism.
David A. Graham Nov 27, 2017 Politics

snip//

Although Trump has clear motives for dismissing the Access Hollywood tape, that doesn’t indicate whether he is simply lying or really believes it. The president has no hesitations about feeding the public untruths. During his trip to Asia, he deferred comment on Moore, telling reporters, “Believe it or not, even when I’m in Washington or New York, I do not watch much television.” That statement is belied by his frequent tweets about specific segments on TV, his constant complaining about some outlets (including a fresh spree over the weekend), and his similarly frequent free advertising for Fox News. As commentators have been noting for months, the president often seems to be gaslighting the public, insisting that they can’t believe their own lying eyes, or ears. This is a potentially potent method of demagoguery, given psychological research on the fallibility of memory.

Yet there are also signs that Trump is sometimes incapable of discerning real life from fiction. The fact that the president shared his doubts about the tape not via Twitter but in private conversations—including, amazingly, with a U.S. senator—might suggest that the problem is not that Trump is out to fool the public but that he himself has fallen into the trap of rewriting his memory. That the president could be so inconstant on a matter of provable fact is for obvious reasons worrisome in the policy sphere.

It turns out, though, that there are some claims the president is prepared to accept. Trump has been quick to credit allegations made against political opponents, from groping claims against Senator Al Franken to the multiple sexual-assault and rape claims against Harvey Weinstein.

It may be that the president’s approach to the claims against Moore reflects a similarly bald political calculus. Monday morning, a White House official told the AP that Trump would not travel to Alabama to campaign on Moore’s behalf, which may represent White House pessimism about Moore’s prospects. If the president sticks to that—and as we’ve seen, he frequently reverses his own staff’s statements—it would represent a remarkable act of Solomonic baby-splitting. On the one hand, the president doesn’t think it’s worth hitting the trail for Moore, yet he also is willing to stake his credibility on dismissing all evidence against Moore. For Trump, the truth is something that can be played with, but politics is serious business.

[Orsino]

1. The president has spent his adult life making pronoucements...

...that others are responsible for interpreting/implementing (or pretending to implement until he forgets). I would like to see a Star Trek episode involving a child raised by/in a holodeck, as I'm sure it could be instructive.

His MO worked well enough within Trump Tower, and when few journalists scrutinized his activity. Out in the real world, it's less effective, but Trump has no back-up plan. He'll continue to bully, threaten and deny, to blame others for his fumblings and to claim credit for anything that seems to be going in his favor. It's all he knows, and this late in life he seems incapable of learnng.