Trump's Big CON: He's Not Lying Because It is a Performance

UPDATE III:  "Trump, unlike most politicians and, frankly, most people, will nonchalantly argue two logically inconsistent points at the same time."

Read the Washington Post, The fake news is coming from inside the White House, which compares Trump's criticism of leaks and his frequent use of anonymous sources to praise himself and denounce critics, while in office and for many decades before.

UPDATE II:  "[I]t has become obvious that Trump’s words about protecting programs like Medicaid were not 'positions' in the sense of being a stance he took based on something he believed. They were passing impulses, probably based on his reading of whoever was in the room with him at a particular moment. Once they escaped his mouth and faded into the ether, they exercised no more hold on him than a promise to release his tax returns or make Mexico pay for a border wall. If they were things Trump genuinely believed in, the White House staffers who wrote his budget would know they’d have to take them into account. But they didn’t."

Read the Washington Post, Sorry, suckers: Trump is perfectly happy to help Paul Ryan shred the safety net. 

UPDATE: Trump loved criticizing others for being tired, bowing to foreign leaders, not wearing headscarves in Saudi Arabia, refusing to say the phrase “radical Islamic terrorism”, etc.

"The issue here is that Trump scored political points on each of these topics. Now he has shifted in dramatic ways without even nodding to the changes. Meanwhile, many of his supporters who expressed outrage when Obama was president are silent."

Read the Washington Post, Trump hypocrisy continues at home and abroad.

Better than anything, this explains Trump:

"For most of his life, Donald Trump has found words to be his friends. He has used them to build his business, dramatize his achievements and embellish his accomplishments. As important, he has used them to explain away his missteps and to paper over his problems. . .

The Post’s reporters Glenn Kessler and Michelle Ye Hee Lee describe Trump as 'the most fact-challenged politician' they have 'ever encountered.' They pointed out that, after having received a whopping 59 'Four Pinocchio' ratings during the campaign, Trump in his first 100 days made 492 'false or misleading claims,' at an average of 4.9 a day. These fact checkers clarified that 'those numbers obscure the fact that the pace and volume of the president’s misstatements means that we cannot possibly keep up.' By their count, there were only 10 days in the first 100 days in which Trump did not make a false or misleading claim. . .

Trump’s approach has never been to apologize because it wouldn’t make sense to him. In his view, he wasn’t fibbing. As his sometime rival and now friend Steve Wynn, a casino tycoon, put it, Trump’s statements on virtually everything 'have no relation to truth or fact.' That’s not really how Trump thinks of words. For him, words are performance art. It’s what sounds right in the moment and gets him through the crisis. So when describing his economic policy to the Economist, he explained that he had just invented the term 'prime the pump' a few days earlier. Never mind that the phrase was coined a century ago, has been used countless times since and was in fact used by Trump repeatedly in the past year. At that moment, it seemed the right thing to say." [Emphasis added.]

Read the Washington Post, The president who cried wolf.