This is just a headline, but I need to grouse about it anyway. We keep hearing, over and over again, that the NY Times can’t label Trump lies as “lies” because they are not mindreaders. But they feel safe reading his mind to assume he actually believes this shit.

It may seem minor, but this is consistent: There’s an excess of caution around “mind-reading” if it hurts Trump, but a casual willingness to mind-read if it fits a narrative framing him as too stupid to be morally culpable.

And frankly, it’s misleading. The prevailing evidence suggests Trump doesn’t really “believe” much (besides racism). He doesn’t not-believe it either. He just has the sociopath’s utter disregard for whether a thing is true or not.

Believing in things means having some kind of moral value attached to truth. But if you don’t experience morality and only experience desire, you can be like Trump, saying things only because they benefit you with utter and true indifference to whether those things are true.

And yes, the NY Times WH reporting team does, despite denying it, advance a specific narrative of Trump, one that casts him as more innocent than he actually is, by portraying him as a doddering imbecile. When, in truth, there’s more deliberation to his lies.