Donald Trump does not lie. Yes, I know. Everyone has said it. Me too. The Washington Post counted more than 30,000 lies from him during his first presidential term. But – I apologize on my behalf and on behalf of so many other commentators – it is a serious misdiagnosis to say that Trump is a liar.
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It would be better if he were, though.
Because if he were, it would mean he knows what is true and what is not true. That he stays in touch with reality. But, since he has no contact with reality, he does not lie. He is a man, in his own way, honest. He believes what he says. He is faithful, absolutely faithful to his own unfortunate self. Those around him are, of course, liars and hypocrites, driven by ambition or money or who knows what emotional deficiencies. But he is different. He inhabits a world that his childish mind has invented. For him, this is the only world that exists.
That is, when Trump declares that he does not steal millions, or that he is winning the war in Iran, no, he is not lying. When he says he is the best president in the history of the United States, he is not exaggerating. It is his truth and whoever does not like it, whoever says the truth is exactly the opposite of what he claims, well, according to him, they do not understand. They must be one of those “terrible,” “ignorant” people spreading fake news – often journalists, usually women – who spend their lives denouncing. Trump turns the tables. He accuses all those who call him a liar of being, precisely, liars. Relentlessly. And he is convinced it is true.
In his imagination, he is a believer and therefore, if his Christian God is as compassionate as the gospels tell us, he should not send him to hell, as many would like. Most likely, Trump was defective from the womb, destined to be an eternal baby. Of course, placing him as president of the United States, with so much power to do so much harm to so many people, was what García Márquez would have called “a mistake of God.” More reason, for justice, not to condemn him to endless torment.
What I do not know is whether the Prime Minister of Canada, Mark Carney, and the people he represents would agree. Trump attacked us and that is why we are at war, says Carney. A trade war. Savage tariffs have been imposed on all Canadian products that the U.S. imports, more than 700 in total, not excluding – believe me – wigs. They appear on the official list of affected products just published by the Trump government. Literally, it says: “wigs (partial), false beards, eyebrows and similar, made of synthetic textile materials.”
Comical, and a fitting metaphor for the fictitious kingdom presided over by the straw-haired madman.
The U.S. president does not lie; he inhabits a world that his childish mind has invented
What is no laughing matter is that the economic consequences for Canadians will be devastating. It will affect everyone’s pockets that what had always been their country’s main trading partner has told them they are now their enemies. They are resilient, though. A Canadian commentator who lived ten years in the United States said this week in The New York Times: “One of the biggest differences I noticed between Canadians and Americans – and, in particular, between Canadian men and American men – lay in their basic conception of what deserves respect. For Americans, the ability to project power, to win, is the main virtue. In Canada, however, the defining virtue is strength: the ability to resist and persevere.”
Trump is the prototype of this childish delusion to always project himself as a winner. We will now see if Americans discover a new capacity to resist the damage that the war their alpha male has unleashed against their neighbors will do to them. They will need it.
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The Wall Street Journal of Rupert Murdoch – not exactly a progressive newspaper opposed to Trump’s Republican Party – has said that the United States has shot itself in the foot. It called the first tariffs last year against Canada “the dumbest trade war in history.” The ones Trump just announced this week “have reached even greater heights of foolishness,” the Journal said in an editorial.
Trump claims Canada cheats them, and that Canada’s defense depends one hundred percent on the U.S.
Foolishness, yes, if you live in the real world. On the Trump planet, it makes total sense. It is based on two arguments he keeps repeating: Canada cheats us, and Canada’s defense, which has no armed forces of its own, depends one hundred percent on the United States.
Let’s examine these two premises in the light of the world as it is, not as Trump imagines it. Canada cheats the United States in the same way a supermarket cheats its customers every time it asks them for money in exchange for a lettuce or dishwashing liquid. A normal deal in which both benefit. Like when Canada sells electricity to the U.S.
But as the eminent Yale historian Timothy Snyder said this week, now exiled in Toronto, “Mr. Trump has built his entire career on fraud and scam. He does not understand that legal exchanges can exist where both parties benefit, not just one.” Besides living in a fantasy world, Snyder adds, Trump is ignorant. His remedy for the supposed scam: raise, through tariffs, the price Americans will pay for electricity, and wigs.
As for the claim that Canada has no army, repeated this week by the genuine liar J.D. Vance, U.S. vice president, and other members of Trump’s cabinet: it is not only a colossal but an insulting falsehood. Canada deployed 40,000 soldiers to fight alongside the U.S. in the war in Afghanistan. 158 died.
But the truth for Trump is what he says the truth is. Canada takes vile and unfair advantage of us, so there is no choice but to go to war until it rethinks. Or, in the best case, surrenders and submits to being incorporated as the 51st state of the U.S. Trump took a step toward this happy outcome on Thursday when he announced that, by presidential executive order, Lake Ontario would henceforth be called Lake America. No one else takes it seriously, no one else believes it. But he does.
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