Not a month in and it’s crystal clear to all but Donald Trump’s most ardent supporters that the man Americans entrusted with the most powerful job on the planet is delusional.

Trump lives in a world of alternative facts. He sees multitudes of illegal voters that nobody else sees. He lies so much his surrogates have taken to referring to the utterances of the 70-year-old billionaire business tycoon as if he’s a misunderstood teenager. They berate the press for misinterpreting tweets and justify his daily gaffs with circuitous deflections and pivots that leave listeners wondering if they have stepped through the looking glass.

Here’s a sampling of first month falsehoods that can be proved wrong by a simple Google search..

• His inaugural crowd was the biggest ever. Period. False
• Three to five million people voted for Hillary Clinton illegally depriving him of the popular vote. False
• The bizarre claim that he’s been on the cover of Time more than anyone. False.
• The media is involved in a conspiracy not to cover terrorism. False.
• The media created a feud between Trump and the U.S. intelligence community. False.
• The murder rate in the U.S. is the highest in 45 years. False.
• His travel ban went smoothly, inconveniencing only 109 people. False.
• The raid in Yemen, which resulted in the deaths of civilians, including women and children, and an American soldier, and the loss of a $70 million airplane, a mission which failed to capture its principle target, was a success. False.
• All polls that are unfavorable to the Trump administration are Fake News. False.
• Americans don’t ‘care at all’ about his tax returns. False.
• Mexico will pay for the wall. False.

What’s most troubling about this small sampling is Trump’s preoccupation with and willingness to lie about petty things like the inauguration and the number of appearances on the cover of Time. Classic symptoms of his mental disorder. Acute narcissism.

As I said in a previous blog, I am no longer making fun of Donald Trump’s swooping dcomb-over, mango-tinted face and gilt-edged taste in furniture in deference to his mental disorder.

That said, his precarious grasp on reality puts not only America but the entire world in jeopardy and he must be held to account.

Listening to Trump sycophants on CNN deflect, pivot, spin, whirl and disassemble in rambling off-topic answers to specific questions is infuriating to viewers with an interest in facts. Here’s a suggestion for Jake Tapper’s next interview with Propaganda Minister Kellyanne Conway. Conduct the interview as if you were performing a lie detector test, in which the examiner pointedly does not allow the subject to ramble on. Pose the above list and insist on a simple yes or no answer to the truthfulness of Trump’s statements, with the provision Conway can only prevaricate when the test is complete. If she refuses to be interviewed under this stipulation take away her platform.

Watching Donald Trump parade his ignorance and incompetence with complete disregard for how his behaviour is perceived by sane people should elicit sympathy for a sick mind. His first month in office would be a sad joke if the consequences weren’t so deadly serious.

Take his latest assertion that Americans don’t understand the ‘tremendous threat’ posed by terrorism, in part because the media has an agenda to keep the populace uninformed. ‘You know why,’ he told his bewildered audience mysteriously. He alludes to the grave danger he recently learned about from the same intelligence community he likened to the Nazi regime when it came to investigations into his campaign’s links to Russia.

Trump might as well be the propaganda minister for ISIS in that he is helping them accomplish their main goal, which is to create undue fear in their enemies.

Think about it. In Trump’s alternative world Americans are living in great peril of imminent death at the hands of bad dudes and hombres who travel to the States with evil intent. The reversal of his travel ban by a ‘so-called judge’ leaves the country vulnerable to murder and mayhem and if anything happens it will be the fault of the judiciary.

The facts say otherwise. Refugees and immigrants already go through extreme vetting and Americans are more likely to be struck by lightening than to die at the hands of a foreign-born terrorist.

The strategy behind terrorism is to instill fear and demoralize an enemy you can’t defeat militarily by hitting soft targets. The terrorist, by definition, seeks to magnify the risk by the prominence and randomness of the attacks. Trump is doing everything he can to further that purpose by ratcheting up the threat factor. ISIS leaders must be peppering the sky with bullets in celebration of their new-found propagandist.

Yesterday, in a showy meeting with law enforcement officers at the White House, Trump went back to a familiar refrain. He cited a spike in the murder rate in a few American cities and then falsely inflated it to the worst killing spree in 45 years. He insinuated that it’s unsafe to walk American streets. I recently spent five months driving throughout the U.S., traveling to major cities like Washington, New Orleans, Memphis and Phoenix and not once sensed danger.

Donald Trump’s malignant mind operates in a maelstrom of fear. Lurking in every corner of his alternative world are nefarious  people out to get him or to put one over on him. The list is varied and growing longer by the day. It includes the media, the intelligence community, the fired acting U.S. attorney general, ‘weak’ Republican senators and congressmen, all Democrats, the Chancellor of Germany, the Chinese, the Mexicans, the Muslims, the Prime Minster of Australia, federal judges, Hollywood  liberals, the National Parks Service, Saturday Night Live, Nordstrom’s.

The one notable not on the list is Vladimir Putin, the dictator who murders dissenters and muzzles the press while robbing his country blind. He shrugs off Putin’s transgressions as if they were misdemeanour parking violations, oblivious to the optics of comparing U.S. wrongdoings to the thug’s foul deeds, even as an investigation is underway to determine if Putin is blackmailing him.

Your narcissist President is fear-mongering to promote himself as the only person who can save the country. The truth is that the biggest danger facing America is the rot from within that propelled a madman into its highest office. Americans have long been self-delusional when it comes to their place in the world as evidenced by the millions who worship a man who tells them he will put America First.

Americans yearn for recognition of their rightful place at the top of the world hierarchy, a spot they feel entitled to by no less than the blessing of God. In their collective myopia, they fail to see what the rest of the world has always known. Throughout a sullied 240-year history during which the country sat out the first years of two World Wars while its allies took the beatings, a history that encapsulates slavery, genocide, civil war, exploitation of impoverished nations, plundering of world resources, assassinations, military adventures that have left millions homeless or dead, America has always put itself first.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

K