I’m surprised it took me this long to see it. Trump thinks that Obama lied about his birthplace because he (Trump) lies about everything. His recent denial of his Access Hollywood tape crystalized this for me. Since Trump lies about even the most incontrovertible truths, he must think that all people do this, so therefor Obama must have been lying, too.
Could be, or he knew it was a source of easy press and doesn’t really believe it himself. He is in many ways the World’s Orange Troll.
My understanding has always been that Trump is easily led and was easily influenced by the wing nut conspiracy theorist Joseph Farah in 2011, with the help of Roger Stone.
I think this is how it got started. There’s no way to know exactly how much Trump believed this nonsense or just saw it as a political tool.
One defense that criminals often use is that “everyone does it, I just got caught!” ISTM that those who say that truly believe that the whole human race shares their viewpoint and are engaged in whatever con works for them. They are deeply mistaken, of course. I would agree that Trump has that tendency - it’s part of the narcissism. So there might be a small element of that in this, small.
As to his just playing this to troll everyone, nope. As recent history has shown, he is very susceptible to conspiracy theories.
The biggest piece of the pie, of course, is his racism. He just couldn’t stand the idea that a black man, A BLACK MAN FERCRISAKE, was President of HIS United States.
Because he thinks it’s funny. And when he says it, a lot of people cheer.
He believes it because he is racist to the bone. This is a guy who settled out of court for refusing to rent to blacks. This is a guy who had to have black staff removed from his casino floors before he came down to see them. This is a guy consumed with outrage that the US elected a black president and it so offends his sense of what the US should be that he had to convince himself that Obama was not truly president.
:smack: Can’t un-see that!
From what I can see, Trump is a solipsist. I doubt it occurs to him that other people have inner thoughts the way he does. Other people are just objects that exist in a universe that is centered around Donald Trump.
So why did Trump support birtherism? Because it served Donald Trump to do so. Why did he suddenly drop it? Because it no longer served Donald Trump. That’s how he sees the world: things that help Donald Trump, things that hurt Donald Trump, and things that don’t matter to Donald Trump.
And then the uppity black man had the nerve to mock him(!) at the WH Correspondents Dinner (2011).
Calling Trump a solipsist would indicate that he has some kind of guiding principles and a grasp of the philosophy of subjective idealism, which is giving him far more credit for intellect that anything he has ever said or done would indicate. Trump is just a borderline personality with narcissistic characteristics. In a conjugate of Groucho Marx, Trump latches on to any group or authority who will have him and espouses their preferred rhetoric regardless of basis. He isn’t even smart enough to keep his illegal alliances a secret (hence his calling out to Putin to provide the hacked Clinton emails during the election) and surrounds himself with like minded people.
Mock? He openly roasts Trump over a spit at the 2016 dinner. “And there’s one area where Donald’s experience could be invaluable, and that’s closing Guantanamo, because Trump knows a thing or two about running waterfront properties into the ground.” I have heard speculation that HBO, Netflix, and Comedy Central have all offered Obama his own two hour comedy special but he’s too busy preparing to take over the role of Nick Fury after Infinity Wars based on how successful he has been at destroying Trump’s legislative agenda while appearing to be windsurfing in the Caribbean.
Stranger
He doesn’t act like he actually believes it. If he did, he’d use the tools of government in an effort to get at and expose what he thought was the truth.
Well, he knows NOW that he’s wrong. But one of the rules of Trump (or the GOP in general, it seems) is to never never never admit you are wrong.
But he does do that, exactly. His brain literally cannot abide the idea that he is anything less than magnificent. He has an election commision formed precisely to find all of those illegal aliens who voted for Hillary, in spite of a total lack of evidence. He cannot accept the idea that Hillary won the popular vote, he is so wonderful that full-blooded americans would of course vote for him. His losing of the popular vote must therefore (in his mind) be from illegal aliens voting for Hillary. So it seems he must actually believe that stuff.
I think the Russian issue hurts mentally for the same reason: in his mind he is so fantastic that he won on his own merits, and couldn’t possibly have needed outside help.
In reply to Napier, above.
I disagree. You can be a solipsist without knowing what solipsism is.
True. Trump’s head is so far up his own ass that he just might vanish one day with a loud sucking sound.
And that’s my fondest Christmas wish.
So, of course, I looked. :smack:
I agree with this. He has 2 criteria for saying stuff:
[ol]
[li]Will it get me attention?[/li][li]Will it interfere with some other source of attention?[/li][/ol]
I think that’s literally all there is to it. Racism gets him a lot of attention, as do whacko beliefs and confrontational rhetoric, so he gloms right onto it. He says this stuff repeatedly enough that he starts to believe that he believes it.
I have known a few compulsive liars in my life, and this is exactly how they operate. Their justification to themselves that they lie all the time, is because they believe everybody lies all the time, and if anybody denies it that just proves they’re lying, the backward logic of lying about not lying.
Of course, pretty much everybody lies on occasion, even if it’s lying by omission or bending the truth or exaggerating, but in my experience that’s a rare thing for most of us. It certainly is for me.
But Trump’s other problem is projection, accusing people of doing bad things when in fact it’s him who has done those things; and it’s for similar reasoning, that he thinks everyone is doing bad things all the time. His idea of empathy isn’t understanding another’s experiences, it’s assuming everyone does things just like he does.
This is also why he has anger issues. He thinks he’s smarter than everyone because he gets away with lying and cheating, so when anybody does anything that doesn’t match his preconceived (sometimes imaginary) notion of human behaviour, that they aren’t behaving like him or how he expects, he sees it as a betrayal, that they’re being sneaky and trying to get one over on him in some way. It makes him feel stupid, which he hates, and he lashes out and blames everyone but himself for this perceived betrayal.
His narcissism is such that he thinks he’s a prime example of humanity, and anyone who behaves counter to that is against him. It’s tough enough to deal with in an ordinary person, but a powerful one is stupidly dangerous. This is exactly why I didn’t want him to be President, as he would become unpredictable and irrational.