It’s not a secret that Donald Trump has been known to deny — not just ignore, as all politicians do, but deny — a lot of basic, authoritatively established facts that get into the way of his MAGA worldview and his habit of self-glorification. But he reached new vistas of delusion during his debate with Kamala Harris, to the point where it was unclear whether he was debating the vice-president or debating reality.
As usual, he denied he lost the 2020 election. But it got worse: He denied what we all watched on television when his long series of election-denying actions fed the insurrection he then refused to stop. And he invented a tragedy that was everyone’s fault but his — Nancy Pelosi’s, antifa’s, even Joe Biden’s and Harris’s.
And still worse, while denying he has any obligation to accept a future election defeat, he has invented a noncitizen voting surge that he accuses Democrats of engineering.
He denied (as “fraudulent”) FBI crime statistics showing crime sharply down during the Biden administration. And he invented a worldwide collapse in crime rates everywhere else that is somehow attributable to American immigration policies.
He denied that the tariffs he has imposed and proposed are paid by American businesses and consumers. And he invented an economic calamity under the Biden administration that he claims has destroyed the country’s manufacturing base and ruined America permanently. Even when the facts support his point of view, he cannot help denying them, inventing inflation statistics for the Biden administration that wildly exceeded the actual rise in living. Everything he did had to be the greatest ever; everything his successors did had to be the worst any people have ever suffered.
He denied his deliberate and transactional efforts to create a Supreme Court that would overturn the very popular Roe v. Wade regime of reproductive rights. And he invented a bizarre claim that “everyone on both sides, Democrats and Republicans, all the experts” wanted states to control abortion policy.
He denied any responsibility for scuttling a bipartisan border-security bill in Congress that Republicans told us he told them to scuttle. And he invented, and made more lurid by the moment, a massive migrant crime wave that extended to the brand-new viral hoax of Haitian immigrants eating household pets in Ohio.
He denied that he was responsible for America’s divisive and destructive politics. And he invented the idea that Harris is “a Marxist,” who is “hated” by the man who made her vice-president and then presidential nominee, and who is consciously planning to destroy the country.
It should be stipulated, of course, that Trump has a devoted following of people who believe his revisionist take on reality, who don’t accept the experts or the statistics or logic or the evidence of their own eyes and ears. It’s hard to imagine, however, that many persuadable people watching this debate will find it so easy to accept that Trump is right about everything and everyone else is wrong. To the extent that Trump made his war on reality so sweeping and absolute and furious on the stage in Philadelphia, he lost not just the debate but his grip.
