Behavior like this is unusual
George Conway takes an extended look at the question of Trump’s disordered behavior.
As Bob Woodward recounts at length in his book Fear, members of Trump’s criminal-defense team fought both Trump and Mueller tooth and nail to keep Trump from being interviewed by the Office of Special Counsel. A practice testimonial session ended with Trump spouting wild, baseless assertions in a rage. Woodward quotes Trump’s outside counsel John Dowd as saying that Trump “just made something up” in response to one question. “That’s his nature.” Woodward also recounts Dowd’s thinking when he argued to Trump that the president was “not really capable” of answering Mueller’s questions face to face. Dowd had “to dress it up as much as possible, to say, it’s not your fault … He could not say what he knew was true: ‘You’re a fucking liar.’ That was the problem.” (Dowd disputes this account.) Which raises the question: If Trump can’t tell the truth even when it counts most, with legal jeopardy on the line and lawyers there to help prepare him, is he able to apprehend the truth at all? Behavior like this is unusual, a point that journalists across the political spectrum have made. “This is not normal,” Megan McArdle wrote in late August. “And I don’t mean that as in, ‘Trump is violating the shibboleths of the Washington establishment.’ I mean that as in, ‘This is not normal for a functioning adult.’” James Fallows observed, also in August, that Trump is having “episodes of what would be called outright lunacy, if they occurred in any other setting,” and that if he “were in virtually any other position of responsibility, action would already be under way to remove him from that role.”
I guess it is unusual to some people, but there are those of us who grew up with this behavior, and in at least some circles, it is the norm. My brother often lied, even in cases where the truth would serve him better, and where the lie was so obvious that he couldn’t avoid being found out. Other members of my family have also fallen in this pattern, and other people that I have known.
So while it seems like bad and unusual behavior for a president, I think for a lot of us, it may not be that unusual. For most of the Washington insiders, they are so removed from the rank and file right wing that they don’t realize this isn’t as unusual as they think it is.
“Behavior like this is unusual, a point that journalists across the political spectrum have made.”
Not nearly enough, they haven’t. Journalists have a lot to answer for in making behavior like this normal, acceptable, and defensible. They report what he says without calling it a lie. They report what he says, as if it’s meaningful. They are megaphones of everything he says, with no moral accountability for spreading the lunatics as if they were important or possibly true. Hands-off reporting has normalized “behavior like this.”