Delusion and desire

William Saletan makes a strong argument that certain core Donald Trump positions are not the product of conscious lies on his part, but rather the product of a delusional mind:

For years, the lie/delusion debate has centered on the 2020 election: Does Trump really think he won it, or does he know his tales of massive fraud are bogus? In the Fox interview, Trump seethed as he repeated his debunked allegations. “If the election weren’t rigged, this would have never happened,” he fumed, referring to various bad events of the last four years. “Let’s see whether or not Fox lets you put that in, okay? If the election weren’t rigged. You hear me? Rigged.”

Was Trump just being theatrical? His behavior throughout the interview indicates that he wasn’t. He leveled similar allegations of fraud and conspiracy against the U.S. Agency for International Development, which he’s trying to shut down. “It’s a scam. It’s a fraud, a lot of it, most of it,” he told Baier, offering no evidence for such a broad statement. “The whole thing is a giant fraud.”

Trump didn’t just claim that Elon Musk’s DOGE bros were finding wasteful spending. He suggested, again without evidence, that they were finding vast hidden corruption. “Nobody thought this would be caught,” he told Baier.

If Trump were just cynically spreading conspiracy theories—first about the 2020 election, then about USAID and other parts of the government—then he might be able, apart from these deceptions, to govern rationally. But the interview showed that on fundamental policy questions, Trump is similarly detached from reality.

On the budget and the national debt, for example, Baier asked: “If you don’t want to cut entitlements, and you do want to add to defense spending, and you want to eliminate taxes on tips, and you want to make the 2017 tax cuts permanent, that’s a lot of money.”

Trump batted this problem aside. “But we’re going to take in tremendous amounts of money on tariffs,” he explained.

Everyone who understands economics knows this answer is nuts. Tariffs don’t magically bring in money from other countries. They increase government revenue by adding to the tax burden on American consumers. They also constrict income from trade and usually spark retaliatory tariffs, damaging the economy and, in turn, reducing the revenue the tariffs bring in. But even if Trump’s tariffs caused minimal economic damage and raked in as much revenue as possible, the numbers wouldn’t come anywhere near the amount of red ink Baier accurately described.

If Trump were just lying about the tariffs—if he didn’t really believe in his illiterate version of economics—he wouldn’t be imposing them already. But he is imposing them. And when Baier asked whether Mexico and Canada, our closest trade partners, had done enough to dissuade Trump from hitting them with further tariffs three weeks from now, as scheduled, Trump said no.

THE DISCUSSION OF TRUMP’S PENDING TARIFFS on America’s neighbors to the north and south prompted an exchange about his persistent talk of annexing Canada. Baier noted that over the weekend, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau had reportedly told “a group of Canadian businessmen . . . that your wish for Canada to be the fifty-first state is a, quote, ‘real thing.’ Is it a real thing?”

“Yeah, it is,” said Trump. “I think Canada would be much better off being a fifty-first state.”

Trump launched into his now-routine riff that Canadians would be happier if they surrendered their independence and joined the USA—ignoring polls that show Canadians overwhelmingly oppose the idea. He pays no more attention to uncongenial surveys of real Canadians than he does to uncongenial ballots from real Americans.

And having used force in a failed attempt to overturn the 2020 election, Trump is now trying to coerce Canada into giving up its independence. “What’s going to happen if I take away the subsidy?” he asked Baier, referring to the prospect that he might cut off American imports from that country. “Canada really ceases to become a viable nation,” he predicted.

Initially, when Trump talked about annexing Canada, Canadian leaders told themselves he was joking. But now they know the joke is over. He’s serious—and dangerous.

Likewise, many people thought Trump wasn’t serious when he suggested a week ago that the United States would evacuate Palestinians from Gaza and “take over” the territory. Since then, however, he has continued to repeat his proposal. In the Fox interview, he filled in some details.

Baier asked: “Would the Palestinians have the right to return?” “No, they wouldn’t,” said Trump.

Would the United States send troops to guard the territory? “No, Israel will watch it,” said Trump.

Trump’s magical idea, in short, is that Palestinians will voluntarily abandon Palestine—forever—and hand it over to Israeli troops. This would leave Trump with his fantasy: a land empty of people and ripe for financial exploitation. “I say we go in, we knock them all down,” he told Baier, referring to Gaza’s remaining buildings. “There’s no Hamas there. There’s nobody there.”

If Trump were just spinning an idle fantasy about an empty Gaza, he would avoid American commitments. Instead, he went all in. “I would own this. Think of it as a real estate development,” he told Baier. Under the plan, Trump declared, “The United States owns the Gaza Strip.”

Trump ignored the emphatic negative feedback his proposal has triggered from Arab countries, just as he ignores negative feedback from Canadian citizens and American voters. “When you hear the pushback from the Middle East, what do you think?” Baier asked him. “I don’t hear that much pushback,” Trump insisted.

He also implied that just as he could squeeze Canada into surrendering its sovereignty, he could pressure Egypt and Jordan to accept nearly two million Palestinian refugees. “I think I could make a deal with Jordan. I think I could make a deal with Egypt,” he told Baier. “We give them billions and billions of dollars a year.”

THIS ISN’T THE WAY YOU TALK if you’re just a liar. You don’t threaten and needlessly infuriate your neighbors and allies. You don’t bet your country’s economy on trade wars. You don’t double down on ethnic-cleansing fantasies involving massive American financial commitments, much less “ownership.”

It’s time to face what the Canadians have faced: Trump isn’t kidding. When he insists that the 2020 election was stolen, that USAID is a complete fraud, that the United States can subsist on tariffs, that Canada and Greenland should surrender to American sovereignty, and that Arab states will help him empty and gentrify Gaza, he’s not saying things he knows are false or preposterous. He really believes this lunacy. He’s deranged.

I think this is basically correct, and I don’t want to get bogged down in semantic quibbles, but I will throw out this caveat: Asking whether Trump “sincerely believes” the 2020 election was stolen from him, or whether revenue from tariffs can fund the US government, or whether his plans for Canada and Palestine and Greenland have any support whatsoever outside his own political cult, is just a category mistake. Trump clings to these assertions not because he believes them to be true independent of his desires that they be true, but rather because his desire that something be true makes it true, because that’s all that “true” can possibly mean to him. ETA: There’s some overlap here with Harry Frankfurt’s concept of “bullshit” — the person has no interest in whether statements are true or false — and I would say that Trump is a bullshitter in regard to things that he doesn’t care about, but in regard to things he does care about he’s a delusional solipsist/narcissist. Those things are true because he wants them to be.

Trump wants something, therefore reality consents to his desire that it be the case. Or more precisely he will rape reality with his desire, if reality fails to consent, because there is no reality outside of his desires.

This is the monstrous narcissism, indistinguishable from some sort of radical solipsism, that characterizes him. Other people and other nations simply don’t exist for Trump, except as objects of his hatred or envy or desire, in that order.

This is certainly delusional in the conventional sense, but the concept of delusion, to be coherent, requires the existence of some outside world, capable of judging whether the subject has an accurate orientation to it. But the outside world doesn’t exist for Trump. Calling him “delusional” implies the possibility of correction and reform, which is obviously impossible in this case, because it and we don’t exist for him. So there is, strictly speaking, no delusion: there is merely his deranged ego, which is now swallowing the whole world and everyone in it.