To be charitable, Donald Trump can be said to have an active fantasy life and that he feels free to share those fantasies with all-comers. And the attack on the World Trade Center on 9/11 holds a special place in this fantasy life. At various times he has claimed to have “watched in Jersey City, N.J., where thousands and thousands of people were cheering.” He has also said, “Many people jumped and I witnessed it, I watched that. I have a view — a view in my apartment that was specifically aimed at the World Trade Center.” Not f***ing likely:

More recently, he has used a fabricated quote to attack Ted Cruz knowing it to be false… we know he knew it was false because his campaign communications director deleted his own tweet of the quote.

I see you deleted your tweet that fabricated a quote from Tom Coburn, @DanScavino. Care to explain why? Or maybe apologize? — Sean Davis (@seanmdav) February 16, 2016

In Saturday’s debate, Trump told the most detestable lie he, or any other GOP candidate, has uttered this election cycle. It is on par with anything Hillary Clinton has said about Benghazi.

TRUMP: How did he keep us safe when the World Trade Center — the World — excuse me. I lost hundreds of friends. The World Trade Center came down during the reign of George Bush. He kept us safe? That is not safe. That is not safe, Marco. That is not safe.

Two days after Donald Trump claimed that he “lost hundreds of friends” at the World Trade Center as a result of the 9/11 attack, his campaign continued to ignore a Daily Beast request that he name even one.

With silence comes the possibility that Trump told the most reprehensible lie of the campaign, just a few breaths from when he called both Sen. Ted Cruz and Jeb Bush liars. By his math, Trump is trying to tell us that at least one in 10 of the 2,983 who died on 9/11 were his friends. “If he has hundreds of friends, he should be able to tell us about them,” said a Port Authority police officer who never talks about how many comrades he lost. “If he can tell us about the hundreds of friends he lost, who they were, what kind of person they were, I might have some respect for him.”

In fact, Donald Trump’s affinity for the victims of 9/11 seems to be inextricably interwoven with whatever political advantage he can wring from invoking their memory. Back to Daily Beast:

The PA cop—who has sought to learn all he could about every single person who died in addition to the many he personally knew—wonders why nobody has seen Trump at the September 11 Memorial and Museum. The cop also wonders why nobody seems to recall seeing Trump at the seemingly endless funerals that followed the attack. The FDNY, which had lost 343 members, had so many funerals and memorials in those dark days that the city asked citizens to attend them to fill the churches. “I don’t remember Trump at any of them,” the cop noted. “Not even the ones that were held at St. Patrick’s, which were right down the block.” The cop meant St. Patrick’s Cathedral, which is just six blocks down Fifth Avenue from Trump Tower, where The Donald resides and works. Among the many funerals held at the cathedral after 9/11 were those for FDNY Captains Patrick Brown and Terry Hatton, as well as Firefighters Michael Boyle and David Arce. Trump does not seem to have attended any.

It is not only Trump’s absence from the various funeral services, odd if you did have “hundreds of friends” killed on 9/11, but he has also been remarkably stingy in donating to 9/11 charities, either at the time of the attack or since. Trump gave just $1,000 to any 9/11 related charity and it went to the Church of Scientology. In fact, Trump has given more to Democrat political candidates than to 9/11 causes… by a factor of 10.

Trump did pledge $10,000 to the Twin Tower fund while calling into The Howard Stern Show, but an online search produces no record of him actually making it.

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?