(CNN) — Jeanine Pirro faced a choice that all President Donald Trump’s team members confront sooner or later: Do they live in his world, or the real one?
The DC US attorney earned a tongue-lashing from the president, an old friend, after reasoning that damage to the capital’s Reflecting Pool resulted from his flawed remodeling project rather than the vandalism he claimed.
By siding with evidence and leaving the looking-glass world that the president conjures around his White House, she infringed the personal bargain that is the price of entry to his inner power circle.
Pirro, as a law enforcement official, is in a dicier position than other officials who can indulge Trump’s unsupported claims without crossing him, since she must submit his accusations to the exacting standards of the courts.
But in most areas of his political life, Trump’s spinning of alternative realities is a powerful tool. It helped him build his political mystique and win two White House races, and it can act as a face-saving cover for his failures.
This salesman’s technique turned the Trump brand into a real estate empire and curated his image as a master tycoon on “The Apprentice” despite the checkered success of his businesses.
When Trump hits a brick wall now, as president, he just fashions an alternative reality. He can talk up tough financial data or a foreign policy hiccup as though he’s bigging up a tatty property in a real estate prospectus.
This approach internally sustains a presidency that is deeply unpopular, with Trump’s approval rating at 34% in the latest CNN/SSRS poll. But it’s increasingly leading its author and the country onto dangerous ground. For many Americans struggling to afford grocery and rent, his “golden age” is a mirage. (Roughly two-thirds of respondents in the CNN poll think his policies have worsened economic conditions.) And the war with Iran that he insisted he won in a few days is now heading into its sixth month.
The ultimate mythmaker
Every successful president is a successful storyteller. Skillful politicians establish personal myths. President John F. Kennedy projected an image of modernity and youth despite his own fragile health to court voters weary of older leaders. It was often hard to distinguish between the screen persona of the movie star President Ronald Reagan and his real character. In 2008, then-Sen. Barack Obama created euphoria with his “hope and change” campaign that was never fully validated by the achievements of his presidency.
But no recent president has so openly broken with reality as Trump.
His method of deciding what is true and requiring everyone to accommodate him emerged as a signature trait only hours into his first presidency. Fuming over unflattering comparisons between his inaugural crowd and Obama’s first swearing-in, he sent then-press secretary Sean Spicer into the briefing room to deliver a bizarre statement. “This was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration — period — both in person and around the globe,” Spicer said.
At the time, it seemed absurd. But it was an important moment. Spicer was the the first Trump official to choose between observable reality and his boss’s false version. Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway coined a presidency-defining soundbite for the ages when referring to the president’s “alternative facts.”
This pattern has endlessly repeated. Trump calls inconvenient but accurate news coverage fake. He treats tough polls the same way. Hyperbole is his best friend: He described his first-term tax cuts as the biggest in history. They weren’t. In 2019, he held up a doctored map of the path of a hurricane to back up his claim it had been on track to hit Alabama, contradicting the accurate scientific data of government weather services.
In his second term, the alternative facts have kept rolling. Trump’s false insistence that foreign nations cough up for trade tariffs contradicts basic economics: The duties are paid by US importers, and consumers end up bearing the costs.
Sometimes, as with the tax-cut fib, Trump’s fables detract from significant achievements and campaign promises kept. But his mythmaking can be more corrosive. When Covid-19 threatened his first reelection bid, he argued the problem was not the pathogen but efforts to stop it. “If we stop testing right now, we’d have very few cases, if any,” the president said in June 2020.
And on election night that year, when he realized voters had rejected him, Trump invented an alternative scenario to spare his embarrassment that pitched the country into its worst political crisis in decades. “This is a fraud on the American public. This is an embarrassment to our country. We were getting ready to win this election. Frankly, we did win this election,” a furious Trump said. His claims ultimately led to the Capitol riot on January 6, 2021, when some of his supporters smashed their way into the Capitol and beat up police officers.
Trump won’t allow losses to tarnish his winning narrative
Trump has never left the personal universe that he created for himself that night. But just as his Reflecting Pool claims would later crash into the verifiable facts, multiple courts threw out Trump’s threadbare claims of massive voter fraud.
The fallout from his election denialism lingers years later: in legislation the president is pushing to tighten voter registration rules and in his attempts to use executive power to curtail mail-in voting as critics fear another disputed election in November.
And anyone who wants to stay in the Trump orbit must indulge this fantasy: Administration officials regularly contort themselves in congressional hearings to avoid acknowledging that he lost the 2020 election fair and square.
And the airbrushing of that dark day at the Capitol goes on. A judge on Tuesday reluctantly dismissed a seditious conspiracy case against leaders and members of the Oath Keepers, a far-right anti-government group. Constrained by deference to the executive branch’s authority on charging decisions, Judge Amit Mehta said the dismissal diminished the gravity of criminal acts. But he added, “The Court cannot write a different ending.”
Trump’s fictions are also having a detrimental impact overseas. He keeps insisting that Iran is “begging” to negotiate after being pummeled by weeks of US airstrikes. But his victory narrative is rather thin. Many foreign policy analysts see the war as a strategic defeat, since the US is struggling to loosen Iran’s grip on the Strait of Hormuz — which was open before the war.
But Trump’s personal brand depends on winning.
So a war that may at best end in an ugly draw must be hailed as a great victory; an election that he lost must have been a triumph; and damage to the Reflecting Pool caused by an unsuccessful renovation must be blamed on vandals.
There’s one thing about Trump: He rarely hides his intentions. He explained his political ace in the hole back in 2018, telling an audience of veterans in Kansas City, Missouri: “Just remember, what you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.”
The-CNN-Wire
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