By David K. Shipler 

            PresidentTrump thinks that car exhaust doesn’t harm the environment. He believes that Ukrainestarted its war with Russia. He thinks that the US has given $350 billion inaid to Ukraine, more than Europe. (It’s $174 billion, less than Europe.) What’smore, he remains sure, even after being corrected in public, that the Europeanaid is all loans to be paid back, although both Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyand French President Emmanuel Macron tried to set him straight. 

            Trump thinksthat French opposition leader Marine Le Pen is “in prison.” (Her sentence forembezzlement includes no jail time.) Trump believes that the American economyis a “sick patient,” ripped off by trading partners. (The US economy is theworld’s biggest, with the highest per capita GDP.) He thinks American carcompanies aren’t allowed to sell in other countries. (They are, and China hasbeen a big market for GM.) He believes that Canada charges 250 to 300 percenttariffs on US dairy products and forgetsthat he got those eliminated in his first term. (They never kicked in anyway,because Canadian imports never reached the triggering threshold.)

He thinks that the US never chargedtariffs on Chinese goods until he became president, when “I took in hundreds ofbillions of dollars.” (The figure was $75 billion during his first term, and tariffshave been levied on imports from China since 1789.)

            He thinksthe country is reeling under a crime wave by immigrant gangs. (Crime rates havebeen falling for years and are lower among immigrants than Americans.) Hebelieves the men deported to an El Salvador prison are in violent gangs. (Fewif any have been convicted, and some are demonstrably innocent.)

            And on andon and on. In an autocracy, which is developing under Trump, the leader’s flawsand whims and fantasies are replicated by his underlings out of either zealousloyalty or fear for their jobs or their freedom. Even casual assertions at thetop, whether factual or not, become doctrine. From below, contradictions of thenarrative do not reach the highest authority; they are filtered out by subordinatesunwilling to sacrifice themselves. So, a leader like Trump sets his own trap.He grows insulated and unaware, existing in a feedback loop that amplifies hisfalsehoods. The alternative reality he creates forms the basis of policy, whichoften has immense impact.

            A recent illustrationgot less attention than it deserved. When Jeffery Goldberg of The Atlanticwrote about being inadvertently invited into a Signal chat on attack plansagainst the Houthis in Yemen, Trump was not told by anybody in White House orCabinet. He learned it from a reporter’s question in a press pool. He seemed genuinelysurprised and said he didn’t know anything about it.

The ensuing uproar legitimately focusedon the security lapse, but Trump’s ignorance was telling. He is the architectof a structure of deceit. Unlike his first term, when more mainstream officialswere willing to set him straight, he and the Heritage Foundation have populatedagencies with ideologues who command loyalty to Trump personally and “hisagenda” above the country or the Constitution. That loyalty includessubordination of the truth. The most recent case: the Justice Department lawyerjust suspended for saying honestly in court that an error had been made indeporting a Maryland man legally in the US under an immigration judge’s protectiveorder.

            Since everypresident learns something from reporters’ questions, press pools can leak informationto the president, embarrassing him with his own ignorance. So, Trump’s WhiteHouse has taken from the correspondents’ association the power to choose who’sin the press pools in the Oval Office, Air Force One, and elsewhere. A banwould surely be put on any reporter who might dare to ask this question, forexample: “President Trump, do you know that you’re lying, or do you believe thelies you tell?”

Various answers suggest themselves,but the accurate one might lie beyond Trump’s reach. During last year’scampaign, when he wandered aimlessly through speeches, early dementia wasraised as a possibility. Whether or not it’s dementia, Trump appears to sufferfrom some form of cognitive impairment.

It has been obvious for years thatTrump, either by design or inability, does not absorb facts and analyze thepatterns of contradiction and nuance that compose reality. That could be deliberateand calculated, or it could be a neurological defect. The fabrications havecertainly worked for him politically, and they align with his and his closestadvisers’ radical views. He has a transactional relationship with the truth,just as he does with individuals, institutions, and countries: If they suit hispurpose, he’s with them. If not, he spurns them. Truth, too, can be embraced ofdiscarded as it helps or hurts him. Perhaps, in his own mind, he negotiateswith the truth. We don’t know. The public knows his mouth, not his brain. Whathe hears himself saying, true or not, seems to be what he believes and what allhis acolytes think and act on.

In other words, Trump might sufferfrom a grave disability. It would be sad enough for him, but his autocraticstyle transmits this disability throughout his staff and the ideologicalsubordinates who now populate government agencies. So, the disabled presidentis disabling the country and much of the world.

What’s more, Trump’s cognitiveimpairment, if that’s what it is, has been codified into an ideology ofignorance, now implemented by battalions of aspiring totalitarians. When Trump officialsdismiss reality as inconvenient, watch out. Immigrants are first, now being deportedunder legal-sounding lies. The same method of fabricated charges can be used tojail citizens. Political opponents can be labeled enemies and charged as supportersof terrorism, audited by the IRS, threatened by pardoned Proud Boys, fired byfearful employers.

The totalitarian mindsetunderstands that information is power. Even in the US, which is still pluralistic,government collects and keeps huge stores of data, which are designed to informsensible policy. Under Trump, information is now being subjected to suppressionand manipulation. Offices that test and survey are being abolished, and statisticalsets are being taken offline.

Trump has set out to destroy the openforums of honest inquiry, the very institutions that have been jewels in thecrown of American brilliance: universities, museums, libraries, privatefoundations, institutions honored with Nobel Prize-winning research. VicePresident JD Vance has called universities the “enemy.” Free universities arealways a threat to autocracies.

Those running the federalgovernment are like counter-revolutionaries, attempting to overthrow the country’sdecades of progress in almost every area of achievement. They are working to facilitatethe creation of alternate “realities” to serve a broader takeover of Americanthinking in economics, medicine, social science, history, and other fields.

Whether or not thiscounter-revolution will succeed is an open question. But it is making headwayas Trump’s illness becomes America’s illness.