Trump lies, likely even to himself

Donald Trump is the jester in his own court. He is the fool in his own village. He sputters lies by the bushel. In a single week, the Stormy Daniels story zinged back and forth like alternating current, the alleged payoff escalating, the lies bombarding each other until, as in some political cyclotron, critical mass was reached and even The Wall Street Journal had to take notice. Trump, it editorially declared, was in danger of losing all credibility.

Alas, this horse is already gone from that barn. Trump’s credibility is in approximately the same category as Daniels’ naivete — gone, baby, gone. The sheer number of lies — 3,001 false or misleading claims in his first 466 days in the Oval Office, according to The Washington Post’s Fact Checker — 6.5 per day, 0.8 per hour in an eight-hour day, but most of them, as you know, coming right after dawn, like the crow of the rooster, a cock-a-doodle-doodling that, like henhouse foxes, sends the morning TV shows into a tizzy.

The lies, the utter disregard for the truth, must not only vex poor Robert Mueller, the special prosecutor who must feel he’s been assigned to prosecute the Marx Brothers, but has to be tough also on those adoring aides who, like Stalin’s reeling apparatchiks of old, have to check the party line daily and then lie about how it is unchanged from yesterday. Something like that. This may explain why Ronny Jackson, who until not long ago ran the White House medical office, was allegedly so free with the pills.

The toll this must take on Vice President Pence alone is frightening to consider. The brave man has to be able to take every Trump lie and every squalid revelation, and integrate it into his deeply felt, but pliable convictions. This must cause repercussions. Karen Pence, like Thomas Jefferson before her, may have to dine alone.

But what about Trump himself? Does he recognize his own lies as lies? A year ago, when he told Lester Holt how he had decided to fire James Comey, he said, “I said to myself — I said, you know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story.” Maybe. But did he actually say that to himself or does he treat himself no differently than he treats others? And when he responds to himself, does he get back the truth, or just another lie?

Such a conversation within your own head in which you don’t know if you’re lying to yourself or yourself is lying to you is bound to have an effect. It is a terrible burden for any man, who besides being a full-time liar, is also commander-in-chief and compulsive Fox News viewer.

So when Trump tells himself that this “Russia thing” is “made up,” is he lying about what he told himself or lying that he even told himself in the first place? When you have so many levels of lying, it can create a form of vertigo of the type that caused my uncle to run off with the brassy Sylvia, a booking agent for strippers in Union City, N.J.

For members of the White House staff, having to always discern what is true and what is false has to be a problem. But the person with the heaviest burden is the military aide who follows the President wherever he goes and carries the briefcase with the nuclear codes, known as the football.

This aide hears much of what Trump says, maybe even what he babbles to himself in an elevator — stuff about Comey, prayers to the late Roy Cohn, to whom he mistakenly gazes heavenward. This aide has to know who he is dealing with.

And so if the time ever comes when Mueller is closing in, when approximately several thousand women attempt to be freed from their nondisclosure agreements, when Rudy Giuliani makes 23 TV appearances in a single day and winds up appearing on “Good Morning Ulan Bator,” when Iran buys some nukes from Pakistan and North Korea’s “Rocket Man” vows to keep his bombs and missiles, and a bewildered Trump turns to his military aide and, red in the face, demands the launch codes, let us pray that the aide has learned something from his time with Trump.

“I don’t have them, Sir,” he says.

Maybe the truth will set you free, but with Trump a lie could save our lives.

He fabricates with such frequency, he seems to have lost all perspective