President Donald Trump on Wednesday told firefighters that he had signed more legislation at this point in his presidential career than any previous president. "We got a lot of legislation passed," Trump said Wednesday, according to a pool report. "But I believe—and you would have to ask those folks who will know the real answer—we have more legislation passed, including the record was Harry Truman a long time ago. And we broke that record, so we got a lot done."
In actuality, Trump has signed 96 bills, the fewest of any president since before Truman. Trump may have been referencing a similar claim his then-press secretary Sean Spicer made in April, when Trump had signed 28 bills, slightly more than other modern presidents had signed at that point in their terms, but considerably less than predecessors like Truman and Roosevelt.
I think this is the most disorienting aspect of the Trump era. We've certainly had presidents who lie before. In fact, they probably all lied to one degree or another. Most people are not 100% scrupulously honest. Indeed, there is ample evidence that some lied to create a rationale to take the nation into war, which is probably the most consequential lie one can imagine.
But this is something else. It's beyond lying. It's delusional.
Trump literally lies more than anyone I've ever encountered in my life. And I've known some liars. In his case, it's almost always as an act self-aggrandizement although he will do it to defend against criticism as well. But it's about him, one way or another. And he seems to be impervious to any facts that may contradict him.
His money and now his power have bought him sycophants who will reinforce his lies. His fantasies are fed by others who seek their own ends by catering to his delusions.
I am reminded of this interesting piece in TNR from a few months back about historical imperial madmen. I think it's safe to say that Trump fits into that mold quite comfortably.
In Nicholas Hytner’s 1994 film, The Madness of King George (adapted from a stage play by Alan Bennett), William Pitt, the king’s prime minister, muses to his parliamentary colleagues:
We consider ourselves blessed in our constitution. We tell ourselves our Parliament is the envy of the world. But we live in the health and well-being of the sovereign as much as any vizier does the Sultan.
Despite George III’s obvious lunacy and incompetence, by then quite advanced, neither a fractious parliament nor the maneuvering of George’s foppish and covetous eldest son can quite seem to do anything about it. (When, eventually, they do succeed in declaring a regency, the king, to their grave disappointment, recovers his senses and returns.) Even in his earlier, more lucid moments, the king was odd and ineffectual, a self-repeating martinet prone to forgetting that America was no longer The Colonies and tut-tutting his ministers for their lack of marital and reproductive commitment. By the time the king is running around the countryside in his nightshirt and producing pots of blue piss, the business of the kingdom has ground well and truly to a halt. “Is the king ill?” the Prince of Wales is asked over dinner.
“He’s not well,” the prince drawls...
And here we return to Donald Trump, whose press conference last week read like an Ionesco play, an absurdist dialogue composed of elementary phrases from a textbook designed to teach foreigners a second language. He hemmed, hawed, cajoled, made faces, whispered, referred off-handedly to “nuclear holocaust,” asked an African-American reporter if she could set up a meeting with black people in Congress. He talked about blowing up a Russian ship, and yelled that he wasn’t going to tell anyone about his secret plans to do something to North Korea. He complained about the military giving advance warning of assaults on Mosul—he doesn’t understand that they do so to give civilians time to flee—and in so doing, he did a bunch of funny voices. It was all quite bonkers; you can look that one up in the DSM.
As far as anyone could tell from the video feeds, the entire senior staff of the nascent administration was right there, sitting in the front row. Like any royal court, this one is beset by factionalism and infighting; everyone is in charge, and so no one is. The president is so whacky, so moody, so changeable that they must attend his every public appearance and study every nonsensical utterance in order to attempt to divine where, for the next ten seconds or so, his attention might alight and then use the opportunity to promote their own advantage.
The Republican Congress, which through contrivance and deliberate inaction, has absented itself from responsibility for war, economic policy, and strategic investment and become little more than a House-of-Commons shouting-chamber to an expansive, imperial Executive, sat in its offices watching aghast before dialing their favorite reporters to privately complain that the President of These United States is a goddamn looney tune.
The result is a paradoxical feeling of panicked inertness, a sense of a rapidly unfolding crisis that is at the same time encased, immoveable, in amber. Is the president ill? Well, he’s not well. And yet, while we hope that he will be carted off, or at least held in check by whichever of his advisers and secretaries is the least odious, we are also—like all those ministers and congresspeople—transfixed.
Transfixed we are. But at least we have an election coming up in less than a year in which we can create a check on his power and send a message to his sycophants that they do not have the support of anyone but their own little cadre. Meanwhile, we cannot look away no matter how disorienting this whole thing becomes.
I don't know what to do about all the lies except try to keep my grasp on reality and not succumb to the ongoing attempts to normalize this royal lunacy. And it is happening. Just look at this:
He was going to sign it no matter what they said. This was wholly gratuitous. They are succumbing.
Anyway, I plan to do my best to keep documenting the atrocities and analyzing what they mean. It's how I keep my sanity in all this. I hope that it helps you keep yours as well, at least a little bit.
If you feel like dropping a little something into the Hullabaloo kitty over this holiday period, I would be most appreciative.
