This is perfect. A New York Times story on Donald Trump’s bizarre mess of a press conference Thursday quotes the popular vote loser saying “I turn on the T.V., open the newspapers and I see stories of chaos. Chaos. Yet it is the exact opposite. This administration is running like a fine-tuned machine.” The story then goes on to cite “people close to Mr. Trump” and “close allies” describing him as unstable and petulant:
It all made the brooding boss feel better, people close to Mr. Trump said.
The news conference, they said, was Mr. Trump’s best effort at spitting the bit out of his mouth and escaping the bridle of the West Wing, where he views his only way to communicate his side of any argument is his 140-character limited Twitter feed. [...]
Yet Mr. Trump’s close allies said he had met his more immediate goal of soothing himself with a sense of control over his own administration.
So he needed to lash out at the media and tell a flood of lies to soothe himself with a sense of control? That’s comforting!
And about those lies: Perhaps the greatest moment of the press conference was when NBC’s Peter Alexander actually stood up and called him out on one directly—his concrete, verifiably untrue claim that “I guess it was the biggest Electoral College win since Ronald Reagan.” While that may be what Trump “guesses,” the reality is that the only person he’s beat since Reagan is George W. Bush, falling behind George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama (and let’s not get started on the popular vote), and he was not happy to be confronted with reality. But there were a lot of other lies. So many lies. The most lies.
Lies about the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals’ decisions being overturned at “a record number” and being “in chaos” (so does that mean it’s really “running like a fine-tuned machine”?); lies about having inherited a mess when in fact he inherited low unemployment; lies about the dangers of undocumented immigrants; lies about Hillary Clinton turning over American uranium to Russia; lies about the "very smooth rollout" of his Muslim ban; repeatedly citing the one decent poll he has among a host of bad ones. And more: creative retelling of Michael Flynn’s misdeeds and dodging questions about his campaign’s other ties with Russia may not quite be lies, but they for damn sure aren’t Trump telling the truth.
But apparently this is what Trump needs to do to “soothe himself with a sense of control over his own administration.” Is it more important to him to lie to us, or to have us hear him lying to himself?
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