It might seem like a full day's work for the President of the United States to repeatedly demand to know "the Oranges of the Investigation," suggest his own father was born in Germany when he was actually born in New York, conclude a rant by declaring "we have to get rid of judges," and insist only "one-to-two percent" of people return for their immigration hearings when the real number in 2017 was 72 percent. You must be unfamiliar with Donald Trump, American president, whose grip on reality may be tenuous, but whose thirst for attention and adulation is bottomless to the point it forms a yawning void at the depths of his soul.

All of the above went down in a Tuesday afternoon Oval Office sanity session. But then the president was off to an event for the National Republican Congressional Committee, where the attendees tucked into a nice dinner and watched the world's most powerful man rant and rave about whatever popped into his mind's eye amid the dark shadows gathering there. First up, there was a very reassuring riff on The Leaks, relayed with macabre hilarity by USA Today reporter John Fritze.

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"Someone's going to leak this whole damn speech to the media," Trump tells NRCC in a speech that is being broadcast live by C-SPAN. — John Fritze (@jfritze) April 3, 2019

It's funny because the United States president has no idea what's going on.

But there was no time to linger, as El Jefe had some things to get off his chest. He's like a Rage Comic, except his grievances are based on the splinters of reality that survive the gauntlet of his cerebral cortex. And the joke is on all of us. It wouldn't be a Presidential Address without a rant about windmills, which Trump knows very little about except that a Scottish firm tried to build a wind farm off the coast of his golf course there, which sent him intergalactic with fear that it would ruin the sea views. It's always nice to have a piece of the puzzle for our energy future dismissed out of hand because of the president's bizarre simmering resentment from his personal life before politics.

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TRUMP during NRCC speech: "If you have a windmill anywhere near your house, congratulations, your house just went down 75 percent in value. And they say the noise causes cancer. You tell me that one, okay? Rerrrr rerrrr!" pic.twitter.com/lYmx84Yxk1 — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 3, 2019

"The noise causes cancer."

I don't think we need to check with an oncologist on this one. File this under Just Say Anything, a cabinet that contains an overwhelming percentage of what comes out of this president's mouth. It is no exaggeration to say that whether or not something is true—that is, whether it reflects what we have deduced about the world around us based on observation and the scientific method—plays no discernible role in his decision over whether to say it. All that matters is, Does this help me get what I want? Truth is whatever you can get enough people to believe. The contours of reality can be bent to your needs and desires.

Want more proof of the worldview? The president, having insisted with zero evidence that 3 million people voted illegally in the 2016 election—which just happens to be the margin by which he lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton—is now suggesting that there was election fraud in the 2018 midterms, in which his Republican Party got spanked.

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Trump tells House Rs to be “more paranoid than they are” about elections and implied midterms were rigged.



“Hey, you gotta be a little bit more paranoid than you are. We have to be a little bit careful, because I don't like the way the votes are being tallied” @nikkicarvajal — Manu Raju (@mkraju) April 2, 2019

Needless to say, or perhaps it needs to be said: it is not normal for a president's party to lose a midterm election and, in response, for that president to suggest the election was rigged. This is because the party holding the White House nearly always loses ground in midterms—though not often by the sweeping margins by which voters punished Republicans a few months ago. History and precedent and evidence and observation are all irrelevant, however. Just Say Anything.

That ethos can drive the kind of gobsmacking shamelessness on which Trump has built his political life. If you not only deny things in the face of overwhelming evidence, but also continually accuse others of the same thing, and have a lapdog media ecosystem to support you no matter what you say or do, it turns out you can pretty much get away with anything in our society. Cue Donald Trump taking shots at someone else for allegedly touching women inappropriately.

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Pres. Trump tees up 2020 fight with swipes at Biden at NRCC dinner. https://t.co/MxJCE7uKo0 pic.twitter.com/EjbNOU4AEU — ABC News (@ABC) April 3, 2019

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President Trump: "My people tell me two years. What do you think? 'One week, sir.' I said general, 'Give me a kiss.' I felt like Joe Biden. But I meant it. See, I meant it. Big difference." https://t.co/sYEfKskAYv pic.twitter.com/PTenWifH5j — The Hill (@thehill) April 3, 2019

The accusations against Joe Biden document undeniably creepy behavior, and are borne out by what was already in the public record. But it is simply unreal to hear this crap from Donald Trump, who, lest you forget, has been accused by at least 17 women of sexual misconduct, including assault, groping, or harassment. Trump has opted to simply deny, deny, deny, even though we have him on tape bragging about this kind of behavior in the Mobile Locker Room.

"I've gotta use some tic tacs, just in case I start kissing her," he once said. "You know I'm automatically attracted to beautiful—I just start kissing them. It's like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab 'em by the pussy."

But of course denial wasn't enough. He had to go after someone for the same thing, just like he did when Al Franken was accused of misconduct. It is shameless on a level that borders on deranged, a description that might also fit his view of the pliability of facts and reality. But the most concerning possibility is that the lights in the winding corridors of his mind are getting darker and harder to navigate. Remember this?

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SNL made a montage of Trump's CPAC speech and it's nuts pic.twitter.com/t5MSYPU0P3 — Aidan McLaughlin (@aidnmclaughlin) March 3, 2019

When the President of the United States got into an extended cyberbullying feud with the spouse of one of his longest-serving and most senior aides last month, a feud that featured that spouse tweeting out a description of Narcissistic Personality Disorder, we asked a bunch of mental health professionals whether there was anything to it. Granted, they'd written a book called The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, so they had staked out their opposition to the president well in advance. Still, many declined to suggest any particular diagnosis, choosing instead to focus on the danger they feel that Donald Trump, American president, poses to the world when vested with as much power as he currently is.

Others did weigh in more definitively, however. Some largely agreed with George Conway, the spouse in question, though most thought narcissism was not the only thing plaguing the world's most powerful man. Antisocial personality disorder came up frequently, but the real doozy was elsewhere. Ellyn Kaschak expressed concerns about "issues related to cognitive abilities." And Diane Jhueck said that "a neurocognitive disorder, such as the onset of dementia, is very important to rule out, especially as it is in his immediate family history."

Again, we're not far removed from Tim Apple, or the CPAC speech that more closely resembled a guy on a street corner yelling at passing cars. The questions raised by those mental health professionals above are questions we must begin to ask ourselves when the President of the United States is ranting to his colleagues about how Windmill Sound Causes Cancer, in a speech he thinks is secret even though it's being televised live on C-SPAN. This is what we're forced to wonder when that speech comes hours after his Oval Office meditations on The Oranges of My Father.

Jack Holmes Politics Editor Jack Holmes is the Politics Editor at Esquire, where he writes daily and edits the Politics Blog with Charles P Pierce.

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