Trump's inability to understand reality is dangerous

His changing takes on Putin show a disturbing disconnect from the factual world

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Ever since Donald Trump launched his half-hearted attempt to bring about peace in Ukraine, we have seen occasional news stories about how the president is getting “angry” or “disillusioned” with Vladimir Putin. But however hurt his feelings have reportedly been, so far there has been no sign of any consequences for Russia. Trump has publicly speculated that he might impose sanctions many times, but he never seems to actually do it.

The latest round of those stories has just arrived, and this time they seem to be backed up by some fairly angry public comments from Trump:

I’m not happy with what Putin’s doing, he’s killing a lot of people and I don’t know what the hell happened to Putin. I’ve known him a long time. Always gotten along with him. But he’s sending rockets into cities and killing people and I don’t like it at all. We’re in the middle of talking and he’s shooting rockets into Kyiv and other cities. I don’t like it all… And I’m surprised. I’m very surprised. We’ll see what we’re going to do… He’s killing a lot of people. I don’t know what the hell’s wrong with him. What the hell happened to him, right? He’s killing a lot of people. I’m not happy about that.

Trump later followed up with this Truth Social post, which included an ominous reference to the “downfall of Russia”:

It’s too soon to know what this rhetoric is going to mean in practice. There’s a chance that it will lead the administration to ramp up pressure on Russia, but insiders are also suggesting that it might just lead Trump to wash his hands of the whole thing and tell the Europeans to bring about peace on their own.

But what it’s not too early to talk about is the stunning naiveté of Trump’s remarks, what they reveal about the cult around him, and how they are further evidence that he’s a terrible “deal-maker”.

Trump has long shown a disturbing disconnection from reality. His frequent misstatements of the truth are not some sort of strategic ploy but the result of an inability to separate fact from fiction. We often say that Trump “lies”, when in fact I think the reality is even more concerning - he inhabits a fantasy world which to him is thoroughly real, so much so that he is not consciously “lying” but rather is disconnected from the factual world.

I don’t think there’s any other way to understand the image of Trump, visibly shaking with anger, asking “what the hell happened to Putin?”. The answer to that question, of course, is that Putin was always the man we see today, something which few people in the world can be unaware of since 2022, if not much earlier. Trump’s inability to grasp this is one reason I think it’s legitimate to ask if he is senile or, if he’s not, how we would know if he becomes so.

One of the disturbing things about Trump is that his disconnection from reality seems to come with so few political consequences. Here you have a president unable to understand the basic characteristics of a man who poses perhaps the greatest threat in the world to American national interests as traditionally understood. His lack of understanding has led his administration to pursue nonsensical policies while pleading with that leader to just please be nice. It has also led him to squander whatever leverage and trust the United States had, making peace much harder to achieve.

And yet roughly half of the U.S. political spectrum and public treats this as completely normal. Why? Among the public, I think much of the problem lies with the way that MAGA pollutes the information space with lies and distortions about the conflict.

As wars goes, the one in Ukraine is actually a remarkably straight-forward, open-and-shut case of unprovoked aggression by a strong country against a weaker one. It is also a war in which America’s vital national interests are undeniably at stake, because how this war ends will have a large impact on whether Russia follows up with more aggression against NATO allies who lie under the U.S. nuclear umbrella.

But MAGA has managed to create enough doubt and confusion in the public’s mind that a sizeable slice have just internalized the idea that “it’s complicated and nothing to do with us”, and so maybe the United States should walk away. As always, Trump and MAGA’s lies (that word again) serve a dual purpose. They really do brainwash a small minority, but the even more disturbing effect is on a larger group who get caught between two narratives - one reality-based and one MAGA’s fantasy - and just throw their hands up and decide that nobody can be trusted and nothing is real.

This tendency is particularly strong with an issue like Ukraine, which doesn’t have any immediate impact on the U.S. public. Voters seem to already be seeing through Trump’s bluster and incoherence on the economy because they already feel the consequences in their day-to-day economic prospects. But Ukraine is a foreign issue, and far away - so the tendency to throw up one’s hands is greater.

For Republican elites, the situation is a bit different - these are the people who I think do the most conscious “lying” of any people in U.S. politics. Some of them are MAGA die-harders, but others are smart people capable of opening a newspaper. They choose to align themselves with Trump’s worldview in part because MAGA-pilled primary voters demand that they do. They consciously boost myths like Trump the Dealmaker because they believe it will bring them personal political success.

But it remains one of the chief ironies of Trump’s presidencies that “deal-making” is at the center of his political brand and yet it is the thing that he is worst at. How can you make “deals” with someone if you’re incapable of a basic assessment of their personality or the facts at hand?

Voters who backed Trump believing he was uniquely positioned to bring peace bought a false promise. But it is Ukrainians who are ultimately paying the price.