This post includes psychology and politics. If you don’t like psychology or you don’t like politics, you can stop reading. If you continue reading, you should know that I’m not focusing on political ideology; I’m focusing on the corrosive effect of lies on trust, relationships, history, and the social contract between government and the people.

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I thought I was having a very bad dream.

Donald J. Trump was speaking. He said,

“Well, it turns out I’m the most — and I think most of you would agree to this — I’m the most transparent president, probably in the history of this country.” 

That was two days ago.

Yesterday, Trump summoned his staff, claimed (again) to be a stable genius (who even makes up bullshit like that?). Then he called on people to speak out in support of him in his temperamental tiff with Nancy Pelosi. Shortly thereafter he posted a spliced video designed to make Pelosi look bad.

Sadly, none of what I experienced had anything to do with an altered mental state. I was listening to the radio when Trump’s fictitious words floated into my brain. This is a big problem, not just for me. There are far too many fictitious words floating around, and far too many people having them drift into their brains, which brings me to my central point: Even though most of us would readily agree that saying or thinking or writing something doesn’t make it so, sometimes, over time and with help from others (e.g., Fox news and spliced videos), and this is the dangerous part, saying something can—and often does—make it so.

My non-dream left me with two powerful insights.

1. Never before, probably in the history of this country, have I been more of a social constructionist.
2. Now I know the EXACT strategy for beating Donald Trump in the upcoming presidential election.

Some of you may wonder what being a social constructionist means. Let me quote some experts:

“There are two main branches of constructive theory . . . both perspectives hold firmly to the postmodern idea that knowledge and reality is subjective. Constructivists . . . believe knowledge and reality are constructed within individuals. In contrast, social constructionists . . . believe knowledge and reality are constructed through discourse or conversation. . . . social constructionists focus on what’s happening between people as they join together to create realities (Sommers-Flanagan & Sommers-Flanagan, 2018, pp. 283-284).

Right now, as I type and as you read, we’re in the midst of a dangerous social deconstruction and reconstruction. Every morning, we awaken to new savage attacks on conventional truth. We’re facing the most chronic and pathological liar probably in the history of this country.

George Orwell might put it this way:

. . . if all others accepted the lie which the [Trump] imposed – if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth. ‘Who controls the past’ ran the [Trump] slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past’ (from the novel, 1984).

Lies corrode trust. Lies destroy relationships. Lies re-write history and shape the future. We all know this from our direct personal experiences.

But there’s a method to Trump’s madness; the method is all about using social constructionism to divide and conquer. Trump is a master at creating new realities through conversation. He’s a master at using dishonesty and the misrepresentation of facts to destroy trust, incite hatred, and gain power. Trump has a nearly reflexive capacity for steering conversations away from conventional reality and toward his subjective perspective.

Trump is engaging us all in a re-write of past, present, and future realities to meet his own narcissistic perceptions. He can’t do it alone, but he has many proponents who support his views. Big money can do that. Sometimes the mainstream media contributes too, albeit inadvertently. For example, when Rachel Martin on NPR’s Morning Edition interviewed Kristen Gillibrand, she referred to Trump as “formidable.” Her words contribute to Trump being perceived as formidable, as if that’s a constructed reality. In fact, Trump is something far less than formidable, which leads me to the recipe for Trump’s defeat.

Trump’s Achilles’ heel is his deep fear of weakness and his compensating wishes for strength, power, and ultimate authority. What this means is that Trump’s so-called strengths are also his weaknesses. To defeat Trump, we must relentlessly target his lies, his weakness, and his inadequacy.

Everything he says should be viewed through the lens of weakness. He wants to drop the mother of all bombs, mostly to compensate for his inner terrpr over being seen as weak. He insists on complete obedience from his administration because he’s too weak to cope with hearing dissent. He’s deeply afraid of being discovered as a fraud, and so he cannot share his tax returns. He must fight to resist the Mueller probe and legal efforts to get at his personal finances, because he’s not man enough to be open, honest, and forthright about who he is and how he does business. He pays off porn stars because he wants to maintain his delusion and a false cover up of who he really is . . . a man who has to pay a porn star for sex and then has to pay for her silence.

The press consistently refers to Trump as an unconventional politician. Other than his lack of political experience, governing experience, and foreign policy experience, I can’t figure out what they mean. Trump is a political caricature. He lies with abandon, buys himself out of trouble, and takes on the persona of an attack dog who attacks people whom he sees as beneath him, principally because he’s scared shitless that his inner weakling-fraud will be exposed.

A small sampling of his lies helps capture his focus.

In the beginning he mocked people with disabilities (is that what strong people do?). He was caught on tape degrading and debasing women (more strength; so much strength). He called Hillary “Crooked,” when his most dominant trait is all about being crooked. His lies are mostly about his desperation to appear strong. Often, they’re obvious projections. Projection happens when a behavior or trait of someone else stirs an impulse in you, so you end up accusing others of something that’s really about you. For example, when Trump claims Nancy Pelosi is “mess” or “crazy” what he’s really saying is “I’m a mess” and “I’m crazy.” Projection is an old-fashioned Freudian defense mechanism that thrives on oversensitivity to criticism, combined with an inability to restrain impulses to say whatever comes to mind. A simpler way of thinking about projection is that the traits of others that really disturb you, may often be your own. And so when Trump refers to little Marco Rubio and little Bob Corker and little Adam Schiff, he’s speaking of his preoccupation with their smallness of stature, but he’s also speaking of his unrestrained preoccupation with and fear of being small and weak. In every one of the preceding scenarios, Trump’s purpose was to put down individuals or groups. Think about the people you know in your life who compulsively put everyone down. Are they the strong people?

That Trump would accuse the media of being fake is another in his legion of lies and projections. Who’s fake? Let’s see, there was the fake Trump University, the fake marriages, the fake condolences that he offered to school shooting victims, the fake losses on his tax returns, the fake claims about his wealth, his fake foundation with fake and unsubstantiated charitable giving, and his fake claims of being “completely exonerated.” There are so many fake things, including his skin color, his physical examination reports, his bone spurs, and his claims of being a stable genius that it’s hard to know what’s underneath. There’s also his fake courage, the fake 91 billion in aid to Puerto Rico, fake statements about Democrats executing babies “after birth,” fake promises about Mexico paying for a border wall, fake claims that Democrats want “open borders,” fake announcements that U.S. Steel is building six new steel mills, fake claims that opioid deaths are down, and, as you know, I could go on and on into his thousands of lies.

To defeat Trump, we must attack two things.

We must attack his compulsive and manipulative dishonesty and his fake news about himself and the world. Every word he and his staff utters should be scrutinized and laid side-by-side with the truth.

We must also attack the perception that he’s anything other than a weak, pathetic, inadequate man who has to pay porn stars to get laid. We cannot ever, for the sake of truth, exonerate him for his lies. We need to pierce his armor of narcissism with the whole truth and nothing but the truth over and over again. In this defense of truth, we must not waver.