Donald Trump's lies are extensions of his delusional ideation and disqualifies him for running in 2024! #DumpTrump

Growing Old Party needs a younger and saner candidate!

Maine Writer opinion- It's not too late to #DumpTrump❗ But who will pay all his legal bills if he is fired as the 2024 Republican presidential candidate?  Surely, no sane person wants to spend campaign money to pay off Trump's dozens of lawyers.  JD Vance was a Marine Corporal and has zero leadership experience.  Elon Musk was not born in the United States. So, what sane person could take Trump's place? GOP Help Wanted!  Looking for any sane person.

Echo opinion by Scot Lehigh published in the Boston Globe:

Donald Trump is either trying to dupe voters with lies or he is seriously delusional. Either way, Americans of all political stripes should be concerned.

To paraphrase the old saying, who are you going to believe when it comes to crowd size, Donald Trump’s lies or your own eyes 👀?

On Sunday, Trump accused Vice President Kamala Harris of using artificial intelligence to create images of “fake crowds” at her events. Meanwhile, in a complaint-laden press conference at Mar-a-Lago last week, the former president claimed that his speech at the Ellipse in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 6, 2021, drew a larger crowd than Martin Luther King Jr.’s historic 1963 speech delivered from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

“She should be disqualified because the creation of a fake image is ELECTION INTERFERENCE,” he wrote on Truth Social.

Reality check. Harris’s crowds haven’t been conjured from AI whole cloth or artificially enhanced. As for Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, it drew about 250,000 listeners, while Trump’s I-have-a-scheme address topped out at an estimated 53,000.

We’ve become so accustomed to Trump’s harebrained assertions that they no longer draw the attention they once did. But with the newly reshaped presidential campaign in its last three months, they should. Here’s why. Trump's endless stream of false claims frame this choice: Trump is either too delusional to comprehend basic reality or he is purposefully and repeatedly lying to voters.

If Trump's false claims were just an occasional thing, one could dismiss them as a slip of the tongue or a mistaken understanding.

But the freshet of falsity that flows from Trump is so continuous that it can’t be explained that way. In his 64-minute rambling Mar-a-Lago press conference, Trump made 162 assertions that a National Public Radio fact-check deemed “misstatements, exaggerations, and outright lies.” The New York Times examined more than a dozen of them. (According to the tally by The Washington Post’s fact-checker, during his four years in office, Trump offered up 30,573 untruths.)

Trump's certainly sound and read like calculated efforts to deceive. Trump, for example, said that the strategic petroleum reserve is “virtually empty,” when it currently contains some 375 million barrels, more than half its all-time high of about 726.6 million barrels. Here, “virtually” is obviously intended to expand the latitude allowed to an off-base assertion before it is labeled a lie.

Trump also claimed that some Democratic states allow infanticide, saying that “Democrats are really the radical ones on [abortion] because they’re allowed to do abortion on the eighth and ninth month and even after birth.”

Actually, infanticide is illegal in every state. Trump’s distortion is an apparent reference to the small number of cases — about 11 a year — when a nonviable fetus or one suffering from severe abnormalities is born during an attempted abortion and doctors employ palliative care rather than intervening to extend the life of the stricken newborn.

There, it’s also illuminating to note that the vast majority of abortions in America, 81 percent, occur in the first nine weeks of a pregnancy, with 93 percent taking place during the first trimester. Only 1 percent came at 21 weeks or later, and then principally because of serious risk to the health of the mother or severe fetal abnormalities.

Without citing any credible evidence, Trump also maintained that a mysterious “they” are trying to sign up illegal immigrants to vote, saying, “Lately, I’ve seen where they’re trying to sign these people up to vote. … They cannot let illegal immigrants vote in this upcoming election.”

This seems to be a reference to a now widely debunked post that made the rounds on X in the spring. As fact-checkers have noted numerous times, it is illegal for noncitizens to vote in federal elections. 

Instances of that sort of attempted voting fraud are very rare. It is, however, a falsehood Trump has offered up before. After the 2016, election, he claimed that Hillary Clinton only won the popular vote because millions of illegal immigrants voted. A commission Trump established to investigate the matter found no evidence to support his allegations of widespread voter fraud. Trump obviously knows that.

The prevalent assumption among commentators has long been that Trump lies to create a sense of shared resentment with his indifferently informed and lesser-educated white male base and keep them enthused about and contributing to his campaign. 

Others suggest he is laying the groundwork for denying another election loss, though after his claim of a stolen 2020, election was revealed as an utter lie, one would have to lean into duncehood to get fooled again on that score.

Now, certain conservative media outlets ignore Trump’s profusion of false statements, sparing Trump supporters without other sources of information the cognitive dissonance of dealing with his serial dishonestly.

No one, of course, wants to believe they are being played for a dupe by someone they view as their champion. But to avoid that conclusion, those who are aware of Trump’s serial dishonesty must confront the only other plausible alternative: He is so deeply delusional that he can’t distinguish between fact and fiction, reality and nonsense.

It hardly needs to be said that someone who suffers from that failing doesn’t belong anywhere near the Oval Office. 

IOW #PsychoTrump❗  #DumpTrump