Donald Trump is exhausting. On Saturday and Sunday, he said and then repeated that “thousands” of Muslims in New Jersey on 11 September 2001 cheered the attacks on New York City. It never happened, but he doesn’t care who gets hurt.

Trump will keep saying things like that, and by the time journalists are done disproving the last spurious claim, he will be on to the next one. His campaign website might as well be Snopes.com. The only limits to Donald Trump are the limits of belief.

The media could try placing limits on him – but ask Megyn Kelly how well that went for her, or Fox News in general. Or just think how impossible it is for anyone to counter the fantastical with facts.

Trump regularly makes things up, then demands that his challengers prove him wrong. Most of the time, proving him wrong requires the impossibility of proving a negative, which gives Trump all the room he needs to maneuver.

You can prove that there weren’t Muslims thronging the Jersey shore to cheer the ruins of the World Trade Center, but you can’t prove that Donald Trump didn’t see Super-8 footage of a Jersey warehouse show of a Kharijite Supertramp cover band playing in front of a van airbrushed with the words “Death to Breakfast in America”. You can’t prove Donald Trump isn’t Batman. You can’t prove he’s remembering a different timestream that he changed using the Icarus Device.

On this particular assertion, you could ask ABC’s George Stephanopoulos how well confronting Trump on his Sunday morning show went:



STEPHANOPOULOS: Police say it didn’t happen. TRUMP: There were people that were cheering on the other side of New Jersey, where you have large Arab populations. They were cheering as the World Trade Center came down. I know it might be not politically correct for you to talk about it, but there were people cheering as that building came down – as those buildings came down. And that tells you something. It was well covered at the time, George. Now, I know they don’t like to talk about it, but it was well covered at the time. There were people over in New Jersey that were watching it, a heavy Arab population, that were cheering as the buildings came down. Not good. STEPHANOPOULOS: As I said, the police have said it didn’t happen.

You can see the trouble Stephanopoulos had – and that all the media has. Because the howls of movement conservatism have warped journalistic “objectivity” to mean “agnostic about objective reality to the point of having no opinion about its existence”, Stephanopoulos can only appeal to an authority to counter Trump, who can then appeal to whatever he saw or knows himself is true, or simply claim that the authority can’t disprove him.

Unless Stephanopoulos could quote from other police departments, reality is out of evidentiary material. And because of modern he-said/she-said journalism’s default treatment of both sides as equally valid, the act of Trump’s merely saying “No, George” reduces Trump’s fabulism to a difference of opinion.

Even if Stephanopoulos had called out Trump’s statements as lies, his efforts would have failed with a lot of people anyway – not just because Stephanopoulos would have been violating “objectivity”, but for a reason Trump illustrated in his reply: “I know it might be not politically correct for you to talk about it.”

To the not-awful, “politically correct” still means trying to avoid doing things that make people feel awful. To Trump voters or Ben Carson voters – and movement conservatism more broadly – politically correct has migrated to mean “any fact I dislike and can gainsay as solely the insistence of uppity liberal elites”.

Stephanopoulos’s job is futile in a world in which facts are negotiable: being told that two plus two equals four when you want it to be five is then just the tyrannical imposition of a pinhead. In the same way that Trump’s feelings about reality function, even correct math is smug in a way that “truth” is not: “truth” is something unique and knowable, a process of personal revelation. Whatever the truth is, you already know it, in your gut or heart or some southernly organ.

If you then know that even Muslim Americans hate America, a claim that there weren’t thousands of them cheering the smoking crater of the WTC merely proves that reality is deficient. You know that people get history wrong all the time. It’s why boards of education keep trying to remove slavery from the American timeline. You know America would never do that.

Trump knows too well how personal truth trumps reality. His demeanor with people like Stephanopoulos shows that consistency and accuracy are his least concerns. Like his sales pitch to America, the point is always winning, winning all the time, winning until people get sick of winning.

At any given moment, what is real to Donald Trump is whatever he needs to say to prove whatever point he’s already decided must be true, which is whatever he decided was already necessary to serve some other purpose. Like an old sitcom episode in which the entire family has to tell a series of lies because the boss is coming over for dinner, it’s a concatenation of situational deceit expanding so relentlessly that nobody can remember what the original squalid point of it was.

Trump is not even original in his willingness to bend reality to his political will. The current iteration of the situational lie goes back to a Bush administration aide’s disclosure to Ron Suskind that we’re not in “the reality-based community” anymore.

We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality ... we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too ... We’re history’s actors ... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.

The only difference between Bush and Trump is that Trump is so crass about it.

Trump’s crassness may be the only limit to his strategy’s utility. A campaign and a reality dependent on Donald Trump’s solipsism has worked so far, but Trump has no self-restraint. He can’t stop making things up to suit himself and win arguments of dubious relevance with people he considers beneath him but whom he can’t stop bullying anyway. All that punching down risks missing and hitting people whose own solipsistic understanding of reality already has them punching up at any elite pointing a fact at them crosswise.

Trump’s pandering is truly peerless, but sooner or later, it may run afoul of his own competitiveness. He will be fine so long as he takes care never to make something up contrary to the polite fictions beloved by his base. But, one day, he won’t be able to help himself. He will tell some insolent person waving arithmetic at him that he has some of the best mathematicians in the world, All the best math guys, they know all the very beautiful, very exclusive math, and we know that two plus two is seven.

And somewhere a supporter will think, That can’t be right. Two plus two is five.