Jerry, just remember, it’s not a lie if you believe it.

—George Costanza

To lie, according to Merriam-Webster, is “to make an untrue statement with intent to deceive.”

It is the seventh of the nine words in that definition that has historically stopped journalists from describing demonstrably false statements as lies. Absent an ability to read minds, intent is generally harder to verify than statements of alleged fact.

Behavioral psychology teaches us that people believe things for many reasons. Most parents have had the experience of a child coming home from school and declaring something to be true that is easily proved false. When the child is asked the source of the information, he or she will generally shrug and say, “I heard it at school.” These days, it is as likely the source was a post on the internet.

Usually, there is no intent to deceive in these cases. The child is simply misinformed and not yet equipped with the knowledge or instinct to verify unsubstantiated claims.

Unfortunately, adults aren’t much more reliable. Confirmation bias is a common culprit. A piece of information comes along that confirms an existing belief and we accept it uncritically because we already “know” the belief it supports to be true and we welcome any proof that we’re right. We are more likely to believe things we hear within our social circle than outside it; more likely to believe things we have heard recently than longer ago. And so on.

Which brings us to our 45th president. Both during his campaign and since taking office Jan. 20, Donald Trump has made so many demonstrably false statements that some journalistic organizations have started referring to them as lies. They consider this necessary because anything less judgmental sounds like equivocation, which they consider more dangerous than the leap of faith that Trump knows what he’s saying is untrue.

But when people who have been diagnosed with various mental illnesses say things that aren’t true, we generally don’t think of them as lying. We think of them as delusional. Lying requires the knowledge that what you’re saying is untrue and is therefore based on a rational cognitive process: I know this isn’t true, but it’s in my interest to say it anyway.

To watch Trump’s first interview since taking office, with ABC’s David Muir, is to observe an unintelligible cognitive process. When Muir asked if Trump’s evidence-free claims of massive voter fraud in the presidential election undermine his credibility, Trump seemed not to understand the question.

“No, not at all because they didn’t come to me,” he said. “Believe me. Those were Hillary votes. And if you look at it they all voted for Hillary. They all voted for Hillary. They didn’t vote for me. I don’t believe I got one. OK, these are people that voted for Hillary Clinton. And if they didn’t vote, it would’ve been different in the popular.”

Is this constant repetition of a patently ridiculous claim — millions of people voted illegally and every single one of them voted for his opponent — a verbal tick or a window into the process of pounding in a delusion? It’s vaguely reminiscent of comedian Jon Lovitz’s old “pathological liar” routine. Oddly, Trump channeled the Lovitz character last year to make fun of Clinton campaign manager Robbie Mook’s claim that Russian operatives hacked the Democratic National Committee to benefit Trump’s campaign. In October, the intelligence community released a report concluding that was true.

Other Trump claims — that thousands of American Muslims in Jersey City, N.J., celebrated the attack on the World Trade Center; that the crowd on hand for his inauguration was the largest in history; that the murder rate in Philadelphia has been “horribly increasing” — all sound like things he actually believes. They are so readily disproved it almost defies logic that a rational person — let alone the president of the United States — would lie about them publicly. So is he lying when he says these things or is he delusional, a victim of Narcissistic Personality Disorder or some related condition?

This is worth considering because the latter possibility strikes us as even more dangerous for the country than the former. If the president knows what is true but chooses to lie for his own benefit, it suggests that beneath all those falsehoods is a sane and rational, if amoral, mind. If he actually believes all these falsehoods, there is no way to know what other delusions might take possession of his mind over the next four years.

When we endorsed Clinton for president last September, we called Trump a pathological liar. That wasn’t because we enjoy calling presidential candidates names, it was because that was our best guess — that a pathology, a disease, was the most likely explanation for such a consistent, obdurate aversion to the truth.

So we continue to be agnostic on the question of whether our 45th president is consciously lying when he spews this constant stream of falsehoods. Sad, as he might say, but we think that would be preferable to the alternative. The more worrisome possibility is that we elected a delusional president who cannot distinguish what is true from what is false. Ten days in, that looks entirely possible.

—Dave Krieger, for the editorial board. Email: kriegerd@dailycamera.com. Twitter: @DaveKrieger

