The other day, President Donald Trump claimed he’d had a conversation with a former president who endorsed Trump’s ill-considered war against Iran. According to Trump, the unnamed former president even said that he wished he had done what Trump had done.
Like so many of this president’s misrepresentations, this was a stupid bit of mendacity.
As soon as Trump floated his fib, reporters reached out to the four living ex-presidents—Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Joe Biden—to check the veracity of Trump’s account.
All four, Democrat and Republican alike, reported that they hadn’t talked with Trump about anything lately, including the war with Iran.
As long as Trump has been doing this—and he’s been scrounging around for media attention now for more than a half-century—he must know how journalists work. He had to know that his fabrication would be uncovered almost immediately.
So, why did he do it?
The least disturbing answer is that he just doesn’t care whether someone catches him fabricating falsehoods. He reasons that his gullible, gullible followers will swallow any deception he conjures up, no matter how blatant it may be, and that’s all he cares about.
In some ways, I hope that’s the case.
Because the alternative is truly frightening.
That alternative is that the president of the United States—the person controlling the most powerful arsenal on earth—finally and fully has come to believe his own con and no longer is in firm contact with reality.
Is it possible that Trump genuinely believes he had a conversation and received a pat on the back from a former president, even though Clinton, Bush, Obama and Biden have made it clear in their different ways that they have little regard for him?
Could he be that deluded?
Or was this just a relatively innocent white lie—albeit an incredibly dumb one?
Let’s consider another one of Trump’s recent distortions of fact.
This one is on a larger scale.
Joe Kent, Trump’s director of the National Counterterrorism Center, resigned his post. Kent quit because of what he says is at least one more Trump fabrication.
The heart of Kent’s accusation is in the second paragraph of his letter to the president.
“I cannot in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran. Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby,” Kent wrote.
At least two things make Kent’s angry resignation significant.
The first is that Kent is no Trump hater. He makes clear in his letter that he supported the Trump who occupied the White House the first time around and the Trump who while running for president in 2024 promised to avoid costly and deadly wars in the Middle East.
The second significant thing is that, perhaps without meaning to, Kent’s letter establishes a pattern of duplicity on the part of the president.
By highlighting Trump’s prior commitments to avoiding such wars, Kent makes clear that the president has broken faith with his most devoted supporters. Kent’s implicit argument is that Trump plunged the United States into exactly the sort of war he promised he would keep the country out of.
Worse, Kent says, the president did so by using an egregious falsehood. Iran posed no significant threat to America’s security, so this is a war of choice.
Trump’s choice.
The president responded to Kent’s resignation in typical Trump fashion. Trump said he had always thought Kent was “weak on security.”
That, of course, raises a question.
If Trump thought Kent was weak on security, why did the president put him in charge of perhaps the most important national security work there is—thwarting terrorist attacks?
What’s more, if Iran did pose such a clear threat to America’s security, why didn’t the president try to rally the nation to this fight—starting with members of his own team?
Maybe Trump thinks he did all that.
Just as maybe he thinks he really did have a conversation with a former president about the fighting.
The scariest thing about all this isn’t that Trump could be lying.
No, the scariest thing is that he might actually believe what he’s saying, whether it’s real or not.
That’s terrifying.
