Nothing Special   »   [go: up one dir, main page]

The Atlantic

Trump’s Latest Falsehood Is a Huge Tell

When the former president feels most vulnerable, he begins to deny reality.
Source: Brittany Greeson / The New York Times / Redux

When Donald Trump is at his most vulnerable, when he feels most threatened, he tells fans not to believe their own eyes and ears.

After the January 6 attack on the Capitol, he called the event a “love fest,” denying the video evidence of the violence. After the writer E. Jean Carroll accused him of sexual assault, he said he had “never met” her, despite a photo showing them together.

And yesterday, after Kamala Harris finished a week of arena-size rallies, he claimed that images of her crowds were “fake” and AI-generated. Specifically, Trump embraced a conspiracy theory—touted by pro-Trump social-media accounts known for peddling nonsense—that the Harris campaign had posted a fake crowd photo

You’re reading a preview, subscribe to read more.

More from The Atlantic

The Atlantic6 min read
The End of Parallel Parking
For decades, my dad has been saying that he doesn’t want to hear a word about self-driving cars until they exist fully and completely. Until he can go to sleep behind the wheel (if there is a wheel) in his driveway in western New York state and wake
The Atlantic17 min read
Shoplifters Gone Wild
Illustrations by Ben Denzer The splendor of the American big-box store lay before me, with its endless variety of shaving products in every imaginable size and color—a retail extravaganza, all of it locked behind Plexiglas. I needed a razor, and in o
The Atlantic10 min read
The Man Who’s Sure That Harris Will Win
If you follow politics, you can hardly escape Allan Lichtman, the American University history professor known for correctly forecasting the victor of all but one presidential election since 1984. In a whimsical New York Times video published over the

Related