Trump is a Has-Been Liar.

Trump is a Has-Been Liar.

You can feel it in conversations at grocery stores with people still wearing MAGA hats, in veterans halls, in church parking lots, in boardrooms, around family dinner tables, where politics has often become almost impossible to discuss honestly.

Democrats know it. Republicans know it. Independent voters know it. America’s allies, or should I say former allies, now that Trump’s been president long enough to alienate everybody, know it. America’s adversaries know it. Military leaders know it.

Military parents know it.

The Iranian regime knows it.

Israel knows it.

And, as I mentioned, loyal MAGA supporters know it, although admitting that truth aloud has become almost impossible inside a movement that increasingly demands emotional loyalty and psychological dependency rather than honest observation.

Whether people describe our American-made angst in precisely the same words hardly matters. We all recognize that something is wrong. We recognize that something has changed. And we know that Trump, to put it bluntly, is a senile old liar, utterly disconnected from reality.

That fact was on full display earlier this summer after a succession of dismal public opinion polls. Rather than acknowledging that Americans might be a little unhappy with his performance, or asking why public confidence has fallen, Donald Trump did what he has done through his entire life. He simply declared reality itself to be false.

All in capitals, this is an actual quote: “My real poll numbers are the highest they have ever been,” he proclaimed on social media just a few days ago, as though capital letters possessed the magical ability to erase independent polling, thinking, public dissatisfaction, or, most importantly, yours and my everyday actual experiences.

This was vintage Trump. If facts become inconvenient, invent new ones and insist everyone else accept them. Then shout them and threaten anyone who disagrees with your blatant, barefaced, repeated lies.

Add that to the fact that, visibly, this easily bruised, literally bruised-hands, flesh-covered-with-makeup, aging man is also clearly losing his marbles.

Hey, I’m going to be 75 this summer. So it’s not the pot calling the kettle black, whatever. When you age, things happen to your brain. But if you are also a reality-denying liar, your impulse is never to admit that.

Unfortunately for the White House, polling organizations are not governed just by presidential well-wishers or intimidated by threats. The surveys released over recent weeks paint a consistent picture.

Trump’s approval ratings have fallen into the low to mid 30s in national polls, placing him among the least popular second-term presidents ever in American history, or ever measured.

The historical comparison is not flattering. Going back to modern polling in the 1940s, only Richard Nixon, at the height of the Watergate scandal, just before resigning, registered lower public support during a comparable period of a second term.

Every other president, whether popular or controversial, stood on firmer political ground than Donald Trump.

Ordinary numbers like this would trigger White House panic if you had an ordinary human for a president rather than a psychologically unbalanced man. Presidents have always watched polling carefully and believed it because their political lives depend on it.

Whether they admit it publicly or not, they watch it. They don’t just deny it.

Advisers, given those poll numbers in any other presidency, Democrat, Republican, right wing, left wing, you name it, would gather for emergency meetings under these circumstances.

Staff members would begin to update their resumes and get ready to move on. Speechwriters would be instructed to draft a major address, trying to reconcile the truth of what’s happening in a country to the president. Cabinet secretaries would be dispatched across the country to reassure anxious voters.

Politics is, after all, partly the art of recognizing when the public, that’s you and me, are trying to tell you something. For instance, finding a hundred ways to say, “Mr. President, please go.”

Well, now it’s a failed country with our men and women in uniform getting killed. Now it’s a failed war, lost against the Iranian regime, threatening the entire world economy, started for no reason.

If the economy weakens, proclaim that it’s booming. In fact, the quote, in capitals, is “BEST EVER.”

If prices rise, tell Americans they are actually falling. If military setbacks occur and war is lost, declare victory. If the poll numbers collapse, insist they are fraudulent, in fact, fake news, and invent better numbers. Repeat them, shout them, and yell about them.

And prosecute people, using your Justice Department illegally and unconstitutionally, to persecute anyone who tells the truth.

We Americans may disagree passionately about ideology or the culture wars, but we know that what we pay for groceries and at the gas station has been going up.

We know when the president and the military are lying about their lost wars. In fact, we’ve had lots of practice being lied to about lost wars, haven’t we?

I am the proud father of a U.S. Marine who fought twice in Afghanistan and once in Iraq at the beginning of those misbegotten, lost wars. I know what it’s like to have my own heart, my own flesh and blood, in a war that is being lost by a stupid president, several stupid presidents.

But none of those presidents, George Bush, Barack Obama, none of those presidents were defined by one fact: that they were pathological liars and narcissists who had overwhelmed their own ability to tell the truth to the point where they no longer knew they were lying and hallucinating.

That explains why Trump’s current political difficulties extend far beyond a single unpopular issue or one lost war.

Recent polling suggests he is now far underwater on almost every major question before us, including subjects that once, according to him at least, represented his greatest strengths.

Immigration was long regarded as his strongest political issue, and, by the way, because the Democrats were stupid with open-border policy and invited it.

But nevertheless, he so mishandled it with his murderous ICE agents, his overreaction, and the racist overtones of these huge roundups that ICE is doing.

By the way, ironically, many of those being rounded up are evangelical, charismatic Christians and Roman Catholics, exactly the sort of people that Christian nationalists, if they weren’t racist, would want in America.

But nevertheless, that’s another issue. His actions have eroded confidence.

Meanwhile, the conflict involving Iran has steadily eroded public confidence across the board. He’s losing his own people.

“We’re going to bomb again.”

“Okay, no, we won’t.”

“We’re negotiating, and negotiations are going great.”

“Oh no, they’re not going to go great, so we’ll utterly destroy them and wipe them off the map.”

Those statements have the same credibility as his peace plan for Gaza, while Israel kills thousands of Palestinians, and he posts on social media, “The Israelis love my plan.”

Perhaps even more troubling for Republicans than the raw numbers of the polls themselves is the intensity behind those numbers.

Political scientists have long understood that elections are determined not merely by approval and disapproval, but by motivation. A mildly dissatisfied voter often stays home. A deeply angry voter rarely does.

Strange alliances are forming between liberal Democrats and military parents who realize that the lives of their children are going to be squandered, lost, or threatened by a stupid military led by a fool named Pete Hegseth and an even stupider president.

Actually, not stupid, but going gaga, old, crazy, and having lost it.

By contrast, many Republicans who supported Trump, including his White House nationalist and Christian nationalist fanatic factions, increasingly are exhausted by Trump’s senility, leading to endless, useless, meaningless, lie-infested drama.

That enthusiasm gap matters, particularly during midterm elections.

Trump may be trying to steal or weight elections in his favor, but his lies are insurmountable, and they will take down the party unless Democrats stupidly nominate people who are unelectable themselves and make it a toss-up.

That’s another issue for another time.

But what everyone sees with their own eyes is that Trump is a senile, lost soul. Period.

History repeatedly teaches the same lesson. Governments do not usually fail because reality disappears. They fail because leaders become convinced that denying reality is an adequate substitute for confronting reality.

Citizens compare official lies with their own daily lives. We citizens compare speeches with paychecks. We compare triumphant rhetoric with the price of gasoline, the cost of housing, the uncertainty surrounding yet another foreign conflict, and the questions our children are asking us as they graduate from high school and college and head out into an uncertain future.

This is where Trump’s presidency finds itself right now, today, as I’m talking to you in this commentary on my commentary page, It Has to Be Said, as part of my outreach along with my podcast, In Conversation with Frank Schaeffer.

Declare success. Celebrate achievement. Attack critics. Sue them. Denounce journalists. Ridicule protesters. Threaten them.

Say that the people your thugs tried to kill, did kill, or shot in the face in a car had it coming, that they were terrorists.

Say MAGA supporters encounter people they disagree with who march in No Kings parades. Say a No Kings parade marcher happens to have a guy fixing their car who wears a MAGA hat, does a good job, and they like him.

Trump’s strategy was built less upon governing than upon maintaining a psychological universe in which the leader was never wrong.

Admitting error for Trump would threaten the entire mythology surrounding not just his presidency, but his whole con-artist, woman-molesting, lying existence that has been part of the massive corruption his presidency represents.

It is unprecedented in American history, not by a factor of a couple of times, but by a factor of hundreds of times.

He and his family have cashed in on billions of dollars in profits with the Saudi Arabians and with others, even with America’s enemies, ready to make deals as long as they profit.

Jared Kushner, Trump’s family, and his sons are operating not as if they are mobsters, but as mobsters from the White House.

And this is all lied about.

“No, this isn’t corruption. This is normal.”

Many Republicans, like JD Vance himself, privately acknowledge concerns they will not express publicly, or hint at those concerns on podcasts with Joe Rogan or other people. They try to distance themselves, clearly and nervously preparing an exit ramp.

They know disagreement invites retaliation by Trump as he lashes out in his moment of senility and decline.

Trump’s greatest political weapon has never been legislative brilliance, philosophical consistency, or the ability to convince people.

It has been his ability to make Republican politicians and leaders fear their own voters more than they fear history’s judgment.

Republican members of Congress increasingly recognize the uncomfortable possibility that paying their political future entirely into Trump’s personal bank account, as it were, and being part of his corruption may no longer represent the safest or smartest strategy.

JD Vance, I’m guessing right now, is the most frightened man in America because he sold his soul to this guy.

He knows exactly what he’s done. And he’s pedaling backward as fast as he can, not knowing how to handle this.

Political observers have counted Donald Trump out many times before. Okay, I admit that. Only to watch him survive controversies that would have destroyed almost any other politician.

That includes grabbing women by the genitals and bragging about it, lying, making a billion and a half dollars in one year of his presidency during his second term, or shoveling that amount of money off to his sons and his son-in-law.

But it would be equally foolish right now to imagine that the ordinary rules of political gravity have ceased to exist.

They haven’t.

Reality waits while rallies cheer, while social media explodes, and while television personalities measure viewers and assure them that everything is proceeding according to plan.

But eventually, reality asks only one question.

Here’s the question. It doesn’t matter if you have a MAGA hat, are a left-wing Democrat, or call yourself a socialist. I don’t care.

Here’s the question:

Increasingly, for millions upon millions of Americans, millions and millions of Europeans and Ukrainians, and millions and millions of Iranians and Israelis, the answer is no.

The story Trump is telling doesn’t match my reality or anyone’s reality. It only matches the dreamscape in Trump’s own malevolent, narcissistic, rotting brain.

Trump’s greatest problem is not simply collapsing approval ratings, growing Republican anxiety, a lost war, increasingly unfavorable headlines, or the hidden members of the U.S. military who have been wounded or killed and are being lied about by Pete Hegseth as he covers the facts and the tracks.

The deeper problem is that more and more Americans have stopped believing the story Trump tells us about himself, about the country, or about his war.

In fact, many of us, including Republicans, are as likely, or even more likely, to believe what the Iranians, who are murdering their own people, say about Trump’s lost war and so-called negotiations than our own thoroughly discredited president.

We have begun trusting our own eyes instead of his declarations, even trusting some of our enemies’ accounts when it comes to controversial claims about peace negotiations, war, or who has won what.

And once a leader loses the power to define reality for his followers, all the capital letters in the world will not and cannot make fiction become fact.

We Americans all agree on one thing these days, even if some of us will not admit it.