You Can’t Get There From Here

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What most bears repeating and is most readily forgotten about Trump, even after his shutdown stole paychecks from 800,000 government employees and more than a million contractors for reasons even he never seemed to understand, is that he has no idea what he’s doing. There were certainly ways in which Trump’s shutdown reflected both traditional reactionary values—bullying and stiffing vulnerable working people are core to both Trump and his party—and Trump’s unique determination to leverage his every ugly belief to the max, but also there was never the sense that any of this was happening by design. On Friday, he agreed to the same deal that he rejected 35 days ago for the same reason that he rejected it then, which is that he decided it was the right thing to do. The belief, however inchoate and incoherent, is the thing.

He believes the bit about the smugglers and the duct tape because he believes it, and because he believes it now he will never stop believing it. In the last days of the shutdown, Trump and members of his cabinet explained, with the blithe confidence God gives only to people who have never considered the possibility that they might be wrong, that furloughed government employees could simply “work something out” with their local grocers and debt-collection agencies. When he says something confusing or stupid or glaringly wrong—something that can’t be explained by any existing set of facts or system of beliefs, something that even the embalmed-looking juche vendors on his favorite television channels haven’t dared put up for sale—it’s because he believes it.

This is also true, and maybe even especially true, when Trump is obviously lying. Even before he banged his own personal left turn and began his full-tilt drive into the desert of cognitive decline, Trump was not an especially nuanced or strategic person. His mind is not what it was, and at its peak it was more of a Magic 8 Ball than a supercomputer. He can’t learn anything because he can’t listen to other people if they aren’t speaking from inside a television; he can’t remember what he hears there because he can’t really care unless it’s about him. These deficits are clear when Trump is extemporizing on furloughed workers cutting deals with the milkman or imagining cartoon coyotes piloting sedans full of duct-taped women across the Rio Grande, but they are even clearer when he tells knowing lies. The former tend to be about other people, and so tend to be both lurid and half-assed; he only really ever applies himself when the lies involve himself.

This gives these lies the advantage of being heartfelt, but it also strips them down. The stories he tells about workers gladly giving up their paychecks for his drowsy racist fantasies and the villains working against him are mostly just sounds he makes to keep himself interested; he might have noticed that they drew louder-than-usual hoots from the seething grandparents and dead-ender rubes at his rallies, but he also might not have. His lies, though, are more elemental. They are never anything more than the opposite of truth. If Trump keeps insisting that he’s not being investigated for his relationship to Russia in gratuitous and unconvincing ways, it’s not because he’s trying to leverage some advanced placement Dealpoint or exploit some hidden businessman’s trick or angle. It’s because he’s literally fucking being investigated for his relationship with Russia and because he very much wants people to think he’s not, and because that’s honestly the best he can do because his brain is an old donut bobbing around in a toilet.

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https://theconcourse.deadspin.com/you-cant-get-there-from-here-1831622949