I've been wondering how long it would take for the media to make a link between Trump's literal belief in the magic of positive thinking and his insistence that COVID-19 would just cure itself and disappear.

Looks like CNN finally made the explicit link.

This is a nuance I think *a lot* of even Trump's most severe critics miss when they're like "oh he's just a liar and trying to distort reality."

Like, I really think he literally does operate under the belief that speaking a positive truth with certainty manifests it in reality.

It's not that it makes him not a liar so much as it makes him the most dangerous kind of liar there is: one who doesn't meaningfully distinguish between truth and lies in his own head.

People call Trump a con man sometimes, but it's not really a good characterization.

Has he engaged in illegal grift and attempted cons? Sure.

But con men-- skilled con artists-- don't fall for their own cons.

We tend to underestimate how much of our "reality" is socially constructed, how much of the world around us was brought into a very specific way of being through our social frameworks and beliefs, & also how much of our understanding of that world is structured by those beliefs.

Narcissists and magical positive thinkers are probably actually better at understanding the degree to which our reality is socially constructed than most people.

Their fundamental mistake is thinking *they personally* are the ones responsible for socially constructing it.

These narcissists and magical positive thinkers (who overlap, a lot, for good reason) operate with the belief they can basically shape existence through their words.

To them, their lies aren't lies-- they're words that they believe speak reality into being.

When a narcissist/magical positive thinker says, "we will have a vaccine by January," in his mind that isn't a untruth, even if he's well-aware all signs point to that being just fabulously wrong.

To him, it's truth he's speaking into being.

A good con-man-- a good liar-- will be Method enough to get himself to mostly believe the lie as he says it.

He'll also, however, be compartmentalized enough to 1) plan to make the lie LOOK real, 2) know on some level it's untrue, & 3) aim for plausible deniability just in case.

With Trump, there's no compartment of his brain he's set aside to remain clear-eyed about the world around him.

There is almost certainly no distinction in his mind between Trump, The Act and Trump, the man.

Ever read accounts of the Apprentice set and production process? How the shows were made by patching together clips from untold hours of inconsistent, incoherent Trump behavior to retroactively create a story that made him seem reasonable?

I will bet you dollars to donuts that when Trump watched that finished product, he honestly believed that the stories those shows told were 100% accurate representations of what happened.

That he believed his own act, and thought he'd spoken it into being.

Trump isn't a clueless liar, and he also isn't some genius manipulator of media.

He's a man who honestly believes that if he says something often enough and with enough conviction, it will end up becoming the truth.

Trump thinks he speaks truth into being.

And he's in a constant feedback loop with television shows like Fox & Friends that find ways to take what he says and selectively present or invent wholesale facts that make what he says appear to be the truth.

There's a reason that ignorant narcissists tend to make very effective fascists.

They are uninterested understanding reality. To them, reality is at most an inconvenient obstruction on the path to unifying the words they've spoken with the world as it is seen by the rest of us.

Fascist ideology is very much like the making of The Apprentice.

It's a sewing-together of bits of culture & history into a retroactive narrative of wisdom and greatness.

Incurious narcissists are its ideal promoters, because to them "truth" is just what they speak into being.

Less important "truths" they've spoken that never manifested disappear down the memory hole, while the most important "truths" get repeated endlessly until they *become* the truth, at least in the eyes of the people consuming them through mass media.

That general acceptance of the narcissist/magical positive thinking believer's "truth" closes the feedback loop, confirming for them that they have spoken it into existence, affirming their believe that they have the power to speak things into becoming reality.

This sort of thing is a lie in the sense that the speaker knows the thing is not yet true when they say it.

At the same time, it's not really a lie in the traditional sense, because they believe it becomes the truth simply by virtue of them saying it.

To narcissists and believers in magical positive thought like Trump, the truth isn't an independent reality.

It's more like they see the truth as a Schrodinger cat, not exactly alive or dead until they speak one or the other reality into being.

Narcissists & magical positive thought believers like Trump are ignorant/incurious *because* they believe they can speak the truth into being, even retroactively.

Why study or learn about anything if you think it can be instantly transmuted into something else by power of will?

When you're a man who has managed to live as a successful billionaire with the trappings of fabulous wealth and handsomeness and health and intellect despite "reality" seeming to suggest you have none of those things, why wouldn't you believe reality to be unreliable & malleable?

Add that sensibility to life in a mass media environment & especially a Twitter environment that are chambers custom-built & deployed to disemminate disinfo affirming your correctness and the malleability of reality?

It's a recipe for a man who believes himself a God.

That's why it's silly to think that Trump can be effectively shamed with the truth, whether it's a lie he's caught in or the realities of his physique.

If reality contradicts his words, the message he receives is, double down.

Say it enough, and it will become the truth.

Not "people will think it's the truth."

Not "someone will make it look like the truth."

He really believes reality-- even past reality-- will conform to his words.

He believes his words are the truth, simply because he has said them.

Trump isn't a con-man.

I don't even think he's a liar, really, not in the sense that he knowingly speaks things he believes to be untrue.

He's a religious fanatic, and his religion is himself.

Most narcissists come up against reality eventually.

Eventually, there's a "truth" they just cannot speak into being.

The checks of the courts, the legislature, and the press are supposed to deliver that blow of reality.

They've failed, though, so he remains a God to himself.

The only reason that I think there *might* be an election this year is that Trump wants the accolades of victory and believes he can speak the truth of his re-election into being.

If, even for a moment, he starts to doubt his powers, he will make COVID-19 his Reichstag fire.

The mainstream media, Trump's GOP legislative enablers, Pelosi, and the rest of the Dems tend to treat Trump as merely a petulant child.

They-- and most people-- still don't grasp that he genuinely believes he has a magical power to will his truth into being.

Most of this country still fails to recognize Trump's temper tantrums as the behavior of a man terrified at the slightest encounter with reality, with any fact that might penetrate his shell of narcissism and force him to question his God-power (and ultimately, his mortality).

Trump is a man terrified by even the hint of unwellness.

He's been perturbed by so much as a cough in his presence, even before COVID.

Any threat to his own sense of Godhood threatens his sense of his own safety, health, youth, and delusion of immortality.

That's why he will only accelerate his denialism of COVID, and that's why he will absolutely believe himself to be the final arbiter of that truth.

Anything else means acknowledging the loss of the youth he values above all else and the inevitability of everything he most fears.

This is why I truly believe he'll attempt to force a totalitarian dictatorship upon us if he loses the election.

He will never be able to bring himself to admit failure, because failure would disprove his belief in his power to manifest eternal youth & health & life for himself.

Ultimately, that's what fascism about.

It's about building a country around a myth of the limitless power of the individual will of one person, a myth supplemented with fictional stories patched together selectively and piecemeal from culture and history.

Ultimately, that's what fascism about.

It's about building a country around a myth of the limitless power of the individual will of one person, a myth supplemented with fictional stories patched together selectively and piecemeal from culture and history.

That individual person-- the fascist leader-- believes the truth of the myth, even if reality suggests its falsehood, because they can't afford not to.

To disbelieve would be to accept their humanity and mortality, a fate a narcissist would never voluntarily face.

Until we 1) name that Trump is a fascist, and 2) realize how deep the magical thinking of fascism goes, we'll never be able to effectively predict or counter his next actions.

We will never understand the true threat until we grasp the depth of his fascist delusion.

Stepping off that ledge will seem so audacious to his followers that they will say, he would not do it unless he knew something we don't.

They'll follow like lemmings, and drag the rest of us along with them unless we recognize and break the spell.

Honestly, I'm not even sure where we are in that process.

That's the thing about fascism. It makes cliff ledges look like hillsides.

You don't recognize them for what they are until you're looking back up at them, watching them recede in the distance above you as you fall.

At this point, I don't know if we're in deadfall or just unmoored, off-balance, & drifting cliff-wards.

What I do know is that we need to understand that wherever we may be in the process, we are about to get crushed on rocks far below.

We need to dig our fucking heels in.

That work isn't electoral, though the electoral can certainly exist beside it.

That work involves yelling at the top of our lungs that these are lies, that echoing the hate that undergirds them only furthers their power (hi, Dirtbags), to stand against the tide.

I think maybe that's why it's hit me so hard watching Philly media and politicians respond with a collective shrug to a literal Nazi drag a counter-protester through an intersection with his car at a Philly Re-Open rally. https://twitter.com/gwensnyderPHL/status/1259186981420118019

It would be horrible on a good day, but right now it's like watching a real-life parable play.

We're shrugging as fascists violently, forcibly drag along those that would dig their heels in against our collective journey towards Trump's cliff.

That's our country right now.

If we aren't already over the ledge, they'll finish dragging us there soon.

Either way, we can't afford to give up.

Giving in to exhaustion right now ultimately means giving in to death.

Now more than ever, we need to be holding on to any point of resistance we can with every fiber of our being.

With one hand, we need to grab hold of whatever root or branch or sturdy rock we can find, and hold tight.

With the other, we need to grab hold of each other.

Holding on to our values for dear life.

Holding on to each other.

That's the only way we counter the death-march of fascism.

That's the only way our communities, and especially our vulnerable communities, will ever survive.

The end.