A new “golden age of America” is under way, Donald Trump repeatedly declared in his final pitch to voters before the US midterm elections.
The war in Iran was not really a war, because “we’ve done very little fighting”, the US president stressed. The stock market had hit 88 all-time highs. “They’re saying,” he said, that on his watch the US has become “the hottest country anywhere in the world”.
“We’ve achieved more in less than two years than any administration in American history, and I’ve kept every single promise I made – except far more,” he claimed in an extraordinary speech at Washington’s Lincoln Memorial reflecting pool on the last day of the campaign. “I’ve actually kept far more promises than I made. We’ve done much more than I promised.”
As Americans prepared to cast their vote in hundreds of congressional races across the country, Trump implored them to “pretend I’m on the ballot”, and vote on the policies he had enacted.
This hyper-normalized false reality is a hallmark of narcissists, authoritarians, and despots. It is the very reason that Soviet fascism failed - each lie is a debt incurred to the truth; a loan whose interest is paid by the people stuck with the bill when the bubble pops.