Exactly How Much of What Trump Says and Does is Fake?

It almost gets tiresome, pointing out all the lying that Donald Trump does. He just does so damn much of it that if you pointed out every lie he told and wrote something about it, you would literally do nothing else. But one particular species of Trump lie is so fascinating to me that I just have to point it out whenever he does it, and that is the kind where he just flat out invents fake things that other people said or did.

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Steve Benen brought up this morning an oldie but goodie in this genre, during the middle of Trump’s original “birther” crusade, the one he mounted against Obama. Now, it’s one thing for Trump to have engaged in this particular conspiracy theory and to have asked questions, even though Obama birtherism always was silly and stupid (we banned it here at RedState almost immediately).

However, one of the things Trump repeatedly said during his birther crusade is that he had dispatched a team of researchers to Hawaii and “they cannot believe what they are finding.” He made this claim at least three times on national television. After Obama produced the long form birth certificate everyone went back to ignoring Trump, but the New York Times followed up and determined that this never happened. No one from Trump’s organization or representing Trump ever went to Hawaii to dig through records. In fact, no one did this at all. Nor did Trump ever explain what the “they cannot believe what they are finding” consisted of.

It was all totally and completely fake. Never happened, never was happening. But Trump looked television cameras and said with total conviction that it was happening. Trump’s ability to deliver patent bull***t with total conviction is nearly Clintonian. It’s almost breathtaking how easy it comes to Trump.

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But it’s all part of a pattern with Trump. Many people have observed that Trump regularly retweets white supremacist accounts, because that’s a sexier “scandal.” But one thing that some have started to notice is how often Trump either retweets or gets into discussions with accounts that are literally fake. Cracked has started to catalogue these conversations and the scope of Trump’s flim-flammery is truly staggering:

They’re so stupid that I feel like I’m missing something just by trying to apply real-world logic to them. Like even trying to debunk Trump’s lies in the first place is like pointing out plot-holes in a porno — all you’re doing is announcing to everyone that you’re the wrong audience for what’s going on.

Think I’m exaggerating? Look, if you search through Trump’s twitter history, you’ll find that it’s not at all uncommon for Trump to quote accounts that are not only not real, but obviously not real. If he were a kid buying booze, he wouldn’t bother with the three-kids-in-a-trench-coat routine. He wouldn’t even make eye contact with you. He’d just walk in, take the Evan Williams off the shelf, and drive home in his dad’s Miata. And for some reason none of us would stop him.

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And the thing is, there’s no reason for Trump to do this. Trump really does have millions of actual people who follow him and say sycophantic things about and to him on Twitter. Some of them aren’t even overt white supremacists. He could just as easily pick some material from them to retweet.

The fact that he or someone on his campaign feels the need to make up fake people out of thin air is, I think, legit evidence of some sort of sociopathy in which they just make up stuff because they have a compulsion to do so, even though reality is almost exactly the same as what they are making up.

It’s bizarre, it’s evidence of a serious problem with Trump mentally, and no one seems to care.

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