Trump is an avid follower of the phyllosophy of Dr. Norman Vincent Peale:
“Stamp indelibly on your mind a mental picture of yourself as succeeding…Hold this picture tenaciously. Never permit it to fade…, Affirm it, visualize it, believe it, and it will actualize itself”
“Stamp indelibly on your mind a mental picture of yourself as succeeding,” Peale urged his millions of followers. “Hold this picture tenaciously. Never permit it to fade.”
eals with the world as he wishes it to be, not as it is.
I see a major difference between “stamping an image on your mind” and then seeking to make it true and telling other people it already is true. One is trying to make the world a better place (or at least trying to put yourself into a better place). The other is lying.
Trump does lie. Trump has lied. Trump will lie. Trump is lying. Trump has been lying. Trump will be lying. Trump will have been lying. Trump lied. Trump will have lied. Trump lies. Trump is a liar.
Trump is an avid follower of Dr. Norman Vincent Peale:
“Stamp indelibly on your mind a mental picture of yourself as succeeding…Hold this picture tenaciously. Never permit it to fade…, Affirm it, visualize it, believe it, and it will actualize itself”
Trump deals only with the a delusional world as he wishes it to be, not the world as it is. This world view is portable. One day NATO is a bunch of foreign parasites and the next day it is a world military force commanded by Donald Trump. In both cases it fits his immediate world view and is used without concern for history or contradiction. All of his actions and utterances are referenced only to his currently internalized world view. There is no regard for ‘fact’. So, technically, he cannot lie.
His outrageous statements make sense in the context of his delusional world view. He is not lying. He believes what is obviously nonsense.
This situation has been public knowledge for his entire political career. It clearly explains his strange actions. I find it odd that Trump’s adherence to “The Power of Positive Thinking” is not a part of our current political debate.
Trump lies, but more to the point, he just says whatever he wants to say, especially what he thinks will go over well with his target audience, without regard to its truth value.
We’ve had liars in a position of power before (e.g. Nixon), but we’ve never had a total fabulist like Trump in such a position before.
ETA: The distinction I’m trying to make is that most of what the run-of-the-mill liar (like Nixon) says is true, with lies mixed in here and there. A fabulist (like Trump) only incidentally tells the truth.
You have a valid point. Pathological liars cannot help themselves, and pathological lying is often entangled with a narcissistic or borderline personality disorder, both of which he appears to suffer from. He appears to side with whatever was most recently said to him, regardless of its absurdity, or even its contradiction to what he has said previously. I would suspect there is a lot of inside maneuvering in the WH and even online to be the last person he speaks to prior to his issuing one of his bizarre statements.
He does seek self affirmation but he doesn’t require it. The Pealthnk proposes that if you are adamant in holding to your world view, you will alter reality.
Isn’t one of Trump’s (few) truisms that appearances matter more than reality? In that light, why would you trust anything he says or implies, including some rather fanciful notion that he isn’t lying - he’s just positively thinking! The perception that he’s an optimistic forward-thinker certainly serves him better than the reality of him being an ignorant blithering bloviating liar, no?
In other words, he has thoroughly and repeatedly squandered any right he might once have had to be regarded as intelligent, truthful or wise.
Notice how Trump seldom if ever accuses anybody of lying? It’s because he doesn’t know what lying means. Truth is whatever glorifies and helps him. Everything else is fake or unfair or unreal. But - it’s never a lie. Trump cannot comprehend the concept of lying, because that would mean being conscious of another human’s mental state, and likewise conscious of how that squares with reality. He doesn’t know reality, he doesn’t know other people’s minds, he doesn’t even know his own mind.
He’s as ignorant of the concept of lying as a rattlesnake is ignorant of venom, but that doesn’t prevent either from being very good at what they do.