One of the biggest differences between an ordinary liar and a truly pathological one is that an ordinary liar actually cares if they get caught in their lies.
Pathological liars, on the other hand, don’t even bother to check to see if their falsehoods can be easily discredited since they believe that whatever spews forth from their mouths should be believed simply because they are the ones who are speaking.
There is no doubt that President Trump fits into the pathological category. Truth is so malleable in his hands that he will lie about anything — whether it’s a massive whopper or a small white lie. His narcissism is so great that he simply cannot comprehend the concept that something that he has it in his head to say would not be true since, after all, the thought sprung from his “stable genius” of a mind.
Trump proved his pathology once again this afternoon in his hastily-arranged, impromptu press briefing where he took no actual questions from the assembled White House press corps. The briefing, a pathetic attempt to draw attention away from the historic inauguration of the new House of Representatives led by Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, was essentially another round of border wall propaganda that had Trump making up stories about the level of support his magic ladder-and-tunnel-defying wall has among the American public.
“The people of our country want it,” Trump told the assembled cameras. “I have never had so much support as I have in the last week over my stance for border security, for border control and for frankly the wall or the barrier. I have never had anything like it in terms of calls coming in, in terms of people writing in and tweeting and doing whatever they have to do. I have never had this much support and we’ve done some things as you know that have been very popular.”
Yes, the Republican-engineered tax cut was particularly popular with Trump’s billionaire buddies, we hear. The attempts to overturn the Affordable Care Act was also quite popular with bankruptcy attorneys and sadistic misanthropes, as well.
However, the surest sign that the president was merely recycling the contents of the stable floor in his clumsy sales pitch was his claim of an unprecedented number of calls of support streaming into the White House switchboard.
Besides the inconvenient fact that 58% of Americans think that Trump should drop his demand for funding for any border wall, Trump’s statement was proven patently false by one basic fact — the White House switchboard is closed because of the government shutdown, so unless you have Trump’s personal number for his illegally unsecured mobile phone you would have no way of contacting him to let him know about your support by making a call.
Of course, Trump really could believe that he’s been getting an unprecedented number of calls of support for his imaginary solution to America’s immigration problem and not simply be intentionally misleading America to get what he wants. If that is indeed the case, then he is surely hearing voices in his head and should be removed from office through the invocation of the 25th amendment as soon as possible.
Follow Vinnie Longobardo on Twitter.
Original reporting by Sarah K. Burris at RawStory.
