This is why Trump supporters will believe absolutely anything
Donald Trump caused a minor kerfuffle this week when he styled himself “a Modern Day Nelson Mandela.”
Specifically, the former president saw a common thread connecting the beloved antiapartheid icon's 27 years in prison and his own trial, beginning Monday, over hush money paid to an adult-film actress.
“He is definitely delusional,” Zwelivelile “Mandla” Mandela, grandson of the great man, told the Times of London.
Delusional, maybe — but also modest! Mandla Mandela must not have realized that Trump, in comparing himself to one of the towering figures of the 20th century, was in fact demoting himself. A couple of weeks earlier, Trump had shared a post on his social media site that likened him to Jesus.
A humble Trump said this week on Truth Social that it would be a “GREAT HONOR,” to be a modern Mandela. But this honor apparently wasn't great enough. Two days later, Trump suggested in an interview that he is even greater than the Great Emancipator, Abraham Lincoln, though he had been advised not to say so publicly.
Trump explained to his host on the MAGA outlet “Real America's Voice” that “nobody's done more than I have” for Black people. “I say nobody's done more since Abraham Lincoln,” he elaborated. “I actually wanted to go beyond Abraham Lincoln, but some people thought that wasn't a good thing to do.”
Hey, it ain't bragging if it's true.
To borrow a Lincoln phrase (Trump has the “best words,” but Lincoln's were pretty good, too), it is altogether fitting and proper for Trump to compare himself with a Civil War-era leader. This is because, thanks largely to Trump, the rights of American women have just been returned to where they were 160 years ago.
Trump accurately boasts that “I was able to kill Roe v. Wade” and “I was proudly the person responsible.” As a result of his achievement, conservatives on Arizona's Supreme Court, freed by Roe's demise, resurrected on Tuesday an 1864 law that bans nearly all abortions, even in cases of rape and incest, from the moment of conception. Trump invited just such Wild West jurisprudence the day before, when he said abortion policy should be left “up to the states.”
The truly historic nature of Trump's many assertions of his own greatness is that he can portray himself as Mandela, or Jesus, or Lincoln or Alexei Navalny (which he has also done), and a significant proportion of his followers will believe it. A Post-Schar School poll shows just how deep this pathology runs.
As The Post's Fact Checker, Glenn Kessler, and pollsters Scott Clement and Emily Guskin report, Trump's supporters have become substantially more persuaded by disinformation than they were six years ago. They are more likely to say today that the 2016 election was marred by millions of fraudulent votes and that Russia did not interfere in that election — both demonstrably untrue. A majority of strong Trump supporters today believe his provably false assertions that Joe Biden won the 2020 election because of fraud, that the United States funds most of NATO's budget and that global temperatures are rising because of natural, not human, causes.
In small but measurable ways, Trump's lies are catching up with him.
This week, the Trump Organization's former CFO, Allen Weisselberg, began a fivemonth prison term for lying under oath. And Trump lost his latest effort to delay next week's start of the Stormy Daniels hush-money trial.
Also this week, Trump Media stock continued its downward spiral. Those who bought in at the peak of the “AMAZING” (according to Trump) company's initial public offering on March 25 had by Thursday lost almost 60 percent of their investment.
Then there was his abortion statement in which he expressed his belief that states would “do the right thing.” He also repeated the fiction that “Democrats are the radical ones” on abortion because they support infanticide — “execution after birth.”
But Arizona's highest court disproved both claims the very next day, vividly showing the wild extremism Trump has unleashed in the states.
Trump, the day after the Arizona decision, defended his original abortion statement (“people are very happy”) by expounding on his even more preposterous claim that Democrats wanted Roe v. Wade overturned. “Every legal scholar, everybody from the Democrats and Republicans, they wanted to bring it back, for 53 years, bring it back to the states,” he said after arriving in Georgia for a pair of fundraisers.
Hmm. That's not how I remember it. But if Nelson Mandela says it, it must be true.