TIME: One of my ideas here is that throughout the campaign and now as president, you have used disputed statements, this is one of them that is disputed, the claim that three million undocumented people voted in the election…TRUMP: Well I think I will be proved right about that too.TIME: The claim that Muslims celebrated on 9-11 in New Jersey…TRUMP: Well if you look at the reporter, he wrote the story in the Washington Post.
When the conversation turned to Trump's conspiracy theory about Ted Cruz's father and the JFK assassination, the president said, "Well that was in a newspaper.... I didn't say that. I was referring to a newspaper.... Why do you say that I have to apologize? I'm just quoting the newspaper."The "newspaper," in this instance, was the National Enquirer, a supermarket tabloid with which Trump has an eerily friendly relationship.It'd take hours to go point by point, fact-checking every error of fact and judgment, but Trump's final comments stood as especially interesting: "I inherited a mess, I inherited a mess in so many ways... I mean we have many, you can go up and down the ladder. But that's the story. Hey look, in the meantime, I guess, I can't be doing so badly, because I'm president, and you're not."And that's amazing. In Trump's mind, he's the president, and he's doing well, because he's the president. That's his response to questions about his uncontrollable lying and elusive credibility. As part of an interview in which the president expressed a tenuous understanding of the world around him, pointing to self-satisfying mirages that exist only in his mind, Trump's final thought was, "I can't be doing so badly, because I'm president, and you're not."New York's Jon Chait added, "This small line is an important historical marker of the bizarre and disconcerting reality into which American politics has plunged. Trump is not merely making an attack on truth here. He is attacking the idea of truth. His statement is a frontal challenge to the notion that objective reality can be separated from power."If those who were concerned about Trump being barking mad, this new interview really won't help.