The Logical Outcome Of The GOP's Reality Creation

Thirteen or so years ago Ron Suskind published this in the NYTimes Magazine:

In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn't like about Bush's former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House's displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend -- but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.

The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''

Back then the Republicans in the White House (who, however evil they were, seem so utterly sane now by comparison, don't they?) were creating new realities left and right:

• Waterboarding isn't torture
• Iraq had an active WMD program
• The Iraq war will be over in a few weeks

And so on.

How has that played out a dozen years later?

From the Washington Post:

President Trump has expressed certainty that the special-counsel probe into his campaign’s possible collusion with Russia will be finished by the end of the year, complete with an exoneration from Robert S. Mueller III, according to several friends who have spoken with him in recent days.

Trump has dismissed his historically low approval ratings as “fake” and boasted about what he calls the unprecedented achievements of his presidency, even while chatting behind the scenes, saying no president since Harry Truman has accomplished as much at this point.

Trump also has occasionally questioned whether the “Access Hollywood” video of him crowing about assaulting women was doctored or inauthentic, asking confidants whether they think the sexual braggart on tape sounds like him, according to two people who have heard him make the comments.

And from the New York Times:

In recent months, they say, Mr. Trump has used closed-door conversations to question the authenticity of President Barack Obama’s birth certificate. He has also repeatedly claimed that he lost the popular vote last year because of widespread voter fraud, according to advisers and lawmakers.

Scary part is that he's either presenting a "reality" that he knows to be untrue (in which case he's lying to everyone) or he's presenting a "reality" that he actually believes to be true.

For a guy who has the constitutional authority to vaporize all of human civilization into its constituent atoms, it's very scary either way.

But hey, HILLARY'S EMAILS! BENGHAZI!