DETROIT – To put it bluntly: Does former President Donald Trump have the ability to tell the difference between truth and a lie?
Many of those who have known or covered him for years say that the answer is quite possibly no — at least when the lie is one that Donald Trump has told himself.
“More than anyone else I have ever met, Trump has the ability to convince himself that whatever he is saying at any given moment is true, or sort of true, or at least ought to be true,” his ghostwriter, Tony Schwartz told the New Yorker magazine in 2016, when Trump was running for the Republican nomination for President.
“Lying is second nature to him,” said Schwartz, who came to know Trump intimately when he ghostwrote The Art of the Deal, the future president’s best-selling memoir.
Schwartz, who later said he was filled with remorse for having helped launch Trump’s political career, told the magazine “Trump didn’t fit any model of human being I’d ever met.” He added, “there is no private Trump,” and called him “a living black hole.”
The author, who spent a lot of time with the future president over a year and a half, said he was driven not by any ideas or ideology, or even the love of deal-making, but by a “completely compulsive” need for constant attention, constant praise and money as a marker that proves his success.”
Those characteristics and traits are often listed by psychologists as signs of a narcissistic personality disorder, and those describing Trump often add “malignant” to that.
But though I have talked to a number of mental health professionals over the past five years who agreed with that assessment, none would ever go on the record, for a very good reason:
The “Goldwater rule.”
Back in 1964, the Republicans nominated U.S. Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona for President. Goldwater was seen by many as a dangerous right-wing extremist, and began his campaign by saying “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice; moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.”
He also had a puckish sense of humor; once, during a discussion of nuclear weapons, he suggested “let’s lob one into the men’s room,” of the Kremlin. This frightened people.
Soon, a small, provocative publication called Fact appeared with a cover story whose headline said 1,189 Psychiatrists Say Goldwater is Psychologically Unfit to Be President!
The story was scurrilous; yellow journalism at its worst. The publication had mailed a questionnaire to more than 12,000 members of the American Psychiatric Association (APA) asking about the senator’s mental fitness for the job. As far as is known, none of them had ever examined, treated, or actually met the candidate.
Many just ignored the questionnaire, and some said they saw no signs he was unfit to lead. But more than a thousand offered scathing criticism. Some compared him to Hitler; others said he was filled with self-hatred, and at least one said he was mentally unstable because his father had been Jewish and his mother was a Christian. The story undoubtedly hurt Goldwater, who lost in a landslide.
However, after the election he sued the magazine and its editors for defamation and actual malice, and in Goldwater v. Ginsburg, won a settlement in federal court large enough to put Fact out of business.
Soon afterwards, the APA adopted a strict ethical rule saying that no psychiatrist should ever give a professional opinion about any public figure they have not examined, and who hadn’t given their doctors permission to talk publicly about their mental health.
The wisdom of that seemed clear as years passed, and it became clear that Goldwater, whether you liked his politics or not, was anything but mentally ill; he returned to the Senate, where he became a beloved colleague of liberals and conservatives; in later years, he played a key role in getting Richard Nixon to resign and became an early defender of gay rights.
Following the APA’s action, the American Psychological Association and American Medical Association took similar positions, saying doctors and psychologists should not speculate on the mental health of public figures.
But as President Trump began to display what seemed to many to be increasingly erratic behavior, some medical professionals began to speak out. Dr. Bandy Lee, a professor of psychiatry at Yale University’s medical school, told the House Judiciary Committee in 2019 that Trump’s mental state was “dangerous,” and she and others have urged the APA to modify the Goldwater rule in his case.
Various surveys have concluded that Donald Trump has lied more and more blatantly than other presidents; the Washington Post calculated he told 30,573 falsehoods in four years.
But again, does the former President know they are lies?
Dan, who did not want his full name used because of ethical considerations, was a highly regarded Detroit-area psychologist for more than 40 years who recently retired. When I asked him if Trump knows he is lying, he said “I don’t think he’d be tripped up by a lie detector. That’s because it’s not relevant to him whether something is true or not. That means nothing to him.
“The way he thinks, all that matters to him is ‘what can I get out of it?’ I don’t think, that even after all these years, most people can even guess the full extent of his disturbance.”
The psychologist indicated that he didn’t think what other people thought or felt mattered to Donald Trump at all, something that those who know him personally have known for years.
Susan Adler Thorp, a former reporter for the Commercial Appeal in Memphis, Tennessee, interviewed Trump in 1991, when he got involved in a deal that forced the sale of Holiday Corporation, the company that owned Holiday Inns.
“I recall that I said to him, “Mr. Trump, 2,400 people lost their jobs because of this. He said, ‘yes, but it was a good deal.’ He was totally self-absorbed, and didn’t give a shit about the lost jobs.”
Incidentally, Thorp told me that story at the time, and reaffirmed it when I contacted her for this story. Her portrayal of him mirrors that of David Cay Johnston, a Pulitzer-Prize winning investigative reporter whose 2016 book, The Making of Donald Trump, is still the fullest account of his life before politics.
Johnston made it clear in the book that he was taking no stand on political issues or that year’s election, but presents a study that shows that Trump cares nothing about the truth.
Calling him a modern P.T. Barnum, he said “on one of my first meetings with Trump … I brought up a casino issue that Trump did not know much about, intentionally saying something that was false.
“Trump immediately embraced my faux fact and shaped his answer to it, much the way television psychics listen for clues in what people are saying to shape their soothsaying.”
Finally, an uncannily similar account comes from someone who has known Trump all her life, his niece Mary Trump, author of a sensational 2020 book about him, Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man. She too believes her uncle has a bizarre ability to believe his own lies, and concludes the book by saying:
“The lies may become true in his mind as soon as he utters them, but they are still lies. It’s just another way for him to see what he can get away with. And so far, he’s gotten away with everything.”
What no one is talking about, however, is whether the question of whether Donald Trump understands whether what he is saying is true has any legal relevance, should he be indicted.
Nobody has suggested he might offer an insanity defense, and given his personality, that would seem unlikely. Besides, Congress made doing so much more difficult by passing the Insanity Defense Reform Act of 1984 after John Hinckley was able to successfully plead not guilty by reason of insanity after shooting President Reagan.
But as we’ve seen repeatedly over the past six years, when it comes to Donald Trump, you can take nothing for granted.
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