For this reason, Trump seems to take the most glee in the aspects of the presidency that allow him to reshape the world by fiat. He appears to enjoy exercising the pardon power—an anonymous White House official once described it as Trump’s “favorite thing” to The Washington Post—in part because the granting of clemency allows him to cut through the usual procedures that constrain him from doing as he likes. By declaring a person pardoned, that is, Trump can literally make it so.

Quinta Jurecic: Impeachment, but without the moral clarity

But there are some things in the world that are not amenable to being reshaped at the president’s whimsy. Among them is the weather. If it is raining, it is raining, whether or not Donald Trump tells you that he is getting wet.

The philosopher Hannah Arendt has been much quoted over the past several years on the matter of lying in politics, but it’s her work on the nature of democracy—in the sense of a shared political life among citizens—that offers the greatest insight when it comes to Trump’s authoritarianism and his falsehoods. The core of Arendt’s argument is that, as she puts it, “men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world”—in other words, that we exist buffeted by the actions of others and never entirely in control of our own fate. Democratic politics, in her view, requires an embrace of this unpredictability and an acceptance of the world as shared. She contrasts this with the desire of the monarch or the tyrant to maintain control and shape reality to their will. Trump is an atypical tyrant in that he is more interested in declaring the world to be a certain way than he is in actually putting in the work to shape it, but the control he demands over truth is absolute.

Arendt’s point is that there is something undemocratic about the refusal to admit that one lives in a world in which not everything is under one’s control—that other people exist and will be able to determine independently if a hurricane is not coming when the president says it is. And because such a world is undemocratic, it is also lonely, cut off from the flow of life with other people. It has no room for conversation and debate, much less dissent. “I am all alone (poor me) in the White House,” Trump tweeted in December 2018, slamming congressional Democrats for refusing to follow his legislative agenda.

Writing in The Atlantic, David Graham described Trump’s effort to “make [Hurricane Dorian’s presence in Alabama] real by sheer force of anger.” Notably, the Times story on the political pressure placed on NOAA quotes a “senior administration official” suggesting that the Birmingham office, as the paper puts it, “had been motivated by a desire to embarrass the president more than concern for the safety of people in Alabama.” The suggestion, the Times notes, was offered “without evidence.” It is striking that the administration’s instinct was to see NOAA Birmingham’s actions as an affront to the president, rather than considering whether they might have been directed by a responsibility to the people of Alabama or an allegiance to the facts of the forecast. Everything orbits around Trump—the only person whose experience of the world matters, and who can therefore dictate the terms of reality.