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The escalating dementia of convicted felon Donald J. Trump, continues to threat American democracy, and the nation\u2019s survival, as he continues to spout outright lies and repeats claims of actions that did not occur while his ego writes checks he cannot cover.<\/p>\n
\u201cLast Tuesday, President Trump demonstrated for the few who remain in doubt that his mind is trapped in a fictional world where he is the heroic savior of the nation, if not all mankind,\u201d writes Thomas B. Edsall in The New York Times. <\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n Edsall continues:<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n That day, Trump honored the men and women who braved death or died on Sept. 11, 2001, but most of all he honored himself, portraying himself as willing to lose life or limb during the aftermath of the destruction of the World Trade Center.<\/p>\n Speaking at a\u00a0Tunnel to Towers Foundation<\/a>\u00a0event honoring police officers, firefighters and other first responders, Trump recounted his memory of 9\/11 and the days that followed. It has to be read in full to be truly reckoned with.<\/p>\n I want to just thank my people. I took a lot \u2014\u2014 I was building a big building in New York, and I took the whole crew down there right after this happened. And they were \u2014 they had no hesitation. Everybody went down with me. We went down as a big group of people. Wasn\u2019t too much we could do. I\u2019ll be honest. It was, it was raw.<\/p>\n Nobody had seen anything like it ever. We had other buildings. The United States Steel Building was creaking, really creaking, and we thought it was going to fall down. The truth is, it creaked a lot. It creaked. It still creaks, but it never came down.<\/p>\n And I\u2019ll never forget two firemen. We thought it was coming down on top of us, and two firemen, big strong guys. And I\u2019m not the smallest guy in the world. They grabbed me under the arm, said, \u201cGot to get out of here!\u201d And they literally lifted me up. This is not easy to do. I\u2019m big. They lifted me up and they started running with me. I said, \u201cFellas, I can run myself.\u201d But they were amazing. But they thought it was coming down. It didn\u2019t come down.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n The words were barely out of Trump\u2019s mouth before the challenges to his version of events began.<\/p>\n At 6:30 p.m. that same day, CNN\u2019s Daniel Dale published\u00a0\u201cFact Check<\/a>: Trump\u2019s Story About Being Carried Away by Firefighters After the 9\/11 Attack,\u201d which begins:<\/p>\n President Donald Trump has for years told false or unproven stories about what he supposedly saw and did on 9\/11 and soon after. As the 25th anniversary of the terror attack approaches, Trump told another story at the White House on Tuesday \u2014 in which he\u00a0claimed<\/a>\u00a0to have been carried away by firefighters amid fears of an imminent building collapse at some point after the attack.<\/p>\n It\u2019s possible there are elements of truth in Trump\u2019s latest story, versions of which he has\u00a0told<\/a>\u00a0before, but he hasn\u2019t provided any evidence for it. And some parts of his Tuesday account \u2014 which he delivered\u00a0at an event<\/a>\u00a0honoring 9\/11 first responders \u2014 are misleading at best. He was miles away from the World Trade Center on 9\/11 and was not whisked out of any building near ground zero that day.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Trump acknowledged that he and his crew did not go to ground zero on the same day as the twin towers\u2019 collapse, but claimed \u201cI was there as soon as the Law allowed.\u201d<\/p>\n Twenty-five years ago on Sept. 11, whatever else he was doing later, Trump was four miles away at Trump Tower, where he\u00a0called into WWOR-TV<\/a>\u00a0to say that he could see out one window to the World Trade Center. He also took the time, on a day when nearly 3,000 people died, to mention that a building of his, 40 Wall Street, \u201cwas the second-tallest building in downtown Manhattan and it was actually, before the World Trade Center, was the tallest,\u201d as my news-side colleague Katie Rogers noted last Tuesday. \u201cAnd then,\u201d Trump continued, \u201cwhen they built the World Trade Center, it became known as the second tallest. And now it\u2019s the tallest.\u201d<\/p>\n As Rogers pointed out, \u201cIt wasn\u2019t.<\/a>\u201d<\/p>\n A 2019 PolitiFact report, \u201cDonald Trump Says He Spent a Lot of Time With 9\/11 Responders. Here Are the Facts<\/a>,\u201d makes perhaps the most damning case against Trump\u2019s claims. PolitiFact interviewed Richard Alles, a New York Fire Department battalion chief on Sept. 11, 2001, to check out similar claims about 9\/11 that Trump made earlier:<\/p>\n Alles said he had no knowledge of Trump being at the site or sending 100 or so workers there to help.<\/p>\n \u201cI was in a supervisory role with the Fire Department at the time,\u201d said Alles, who said he was on the scene about 20 minutes after the second building collapsed. \u201cI was there for several months \u2014 I have no knowledge of his being down there.\u201d<\/p>\n If Trump had sent a crew of 100 workers, \u201cthere would be a record of it. Everybody worked under direct supervision of the Police and Fire Department and the joint commander for emergency services. Is there a chance he was ever down there by himself and I didn\u2019t know it? It\u2019s possible, but I know of no one who ever witnessed him there.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n In a Sept. 9 article,\u00a0\u201c60 Posts in 10 Hours: How Trump\u2019s Social Media Reflects His Version of Reality,<\/a>\u201d my colleague in the newsroom Peter Baker provided crucial insight into Trump\u2019s macho, almost fantastical, notion of himself.<\/p>\n Over Labor Day weekend, Baker wrote,<\/p>\n President Trump\u2019s social media account roared to life. In what has increasingly become his weekend habit, he unleashed a daylong barrage of posts that put the bully in the modern bully pulpit.<\/p>\n There were images of Mr. Trump intimidating Canada\u2019s prime minister with a hockey stick, personally bombing enemy targets and patrolling dark streets with killer robots. There were maps showing the United States taking over other countries, and maps renaming a state. There were attacks on the \u201cDumocratic Party\u201d and tributes to himself as \u201cthe Greatest President of All Time!\u201d<\/p>\n The 60 messages posted online over 10 hours and 41 minutes offered a window into Mr. Trump\u2019s own unique reality, one anchored not in fact but in an expression of ego. For years, his social media feed was said to be a mirror of his id. But with A.I., it has become the manifestation of how he wants to be seen in a more visual, visceral way than ever before \u2014 as a warrior, as a conqueror, as a historical figure, as a younger and thinner and more muscular version of himself.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n On Thursday,<\/strong>\u00a0at the Republican midterm convention in Dallas, Trump\u00a0pushed his narcissistic fable-making<\/a>\u00a0to the breaking point, telling the gathering:<\/p>\n Please raise your right hand. I pledge to the greatest president in the history of the United States. That loves us so much he can\u2019t even breathe. That I will go out with my family, my friends, I\u2019ll do it any way \u2014 I don\u2019t care if I\u2019m registered or not, I\u2019m going to try to cheat like hell like they do. There\u2019s never been bigger cheaters. They don\u2019t care. I am going to go out and I\u2019m going to get my friends, my family. And we are going to vote on Nov. 3.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Trump\u2019s dementia has turned the wannabe Facist dictator Trump into an insane lunatic sinking deeper into his toxic, unreal world. Mental health experts agree that he is a danger and grower threat to both this nation and the world.<\/p>\n Donald Moynihan, a professor of public policy at the University of Michigan, points out the dangers in an email to Edsall:<\/p>\n Trump\u2019s loose relationship with reality extends to the issues that define our life, like inflation, public health, the war with Iran, our alliances or whether our elections are valid. For every seemingly harmless story where he inserts himself into the tableaux of history, there is a torrent of dark conspiracies that shape how we are governed.<\/p>\n At this moment, Americans are legitimately worried that the Supreme Court might grant Trump a license to threaten the integrity of the midterm elections because \u2014 not despite \u2014 of his long history of lying about election fraud.<\/p>\n Every time he insults another country or world leader, it feels less like a deliberate diplomatic strategy as his followers insist, and more like an indicator of the absence of such work, marking the indifference of a social media addict craving his next dopamine hit.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Edsall adds:<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n Craig Malkin, a lecturer in psychology at Harvard Medical School, argued in an email that Trump\u2019s narcissism on its own is not surprising: \u201cResearch on American presidents has linked narcissism with charisma, leadership and performance. Anyone who runs for president has to feel special enough to believe they should lead the country and, arguably, the free world.\u201d<\/p>\n Trump, however, is a special case, even among the few whose egos are large enough to prompt a bid for the presidency:<\/p>\n He keeps declaring that he\u2019s ended wars that haven\u2019t ended. He still demands that people accept that he won the 2020 election. He casts himself as either the triumphant hero or the innocent victim of nearly every major event.<\/p>\n He can\u2019t simply be a president who sometimes succeeds and sometimes fails. Increasingly, he can\u2019t acknowledge where he\u2019s gone wrong. He insists that he\u2019s always been right, regardless of the evidence or the consequences of his policies.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n
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