By Chris Satullo

Donald Trump is not bright. He’s ill-informed about vast swaths of history and science. When it comes to logical analysis, he’s a klutz.

But he is immensely shrewd. So much so that he has the ability to warp reality.

The titanic narcissism that makes him so odious to those who despise him is also his superpower. It’s the root of his shrewdness. You see, unlike you, he wastes no time worrying about other people’s viewpoints or feelings. He is blind to nuance. Ethics to him is a foreign language of no interest.

All of his thought and energy get directed, like a powerful laser, at one goal: feeding the needs of his ego. A laser illuminates, but it also burns. Trump does see, far more clearly than most of us do, how to achieve his ego’s ends. Then he follows that path with ruthless, reckless savvy.

Another key to his shrewdness is his assumption that everyone else is as self-centered as he. Which, to the narcissist, justifies whatever he gets it in mind to do.  Others would do the same to him, if only they were as bold and shrewd as he, so he is entitled to do it to them first.

Single-minded people have this trait. The fiercely partisan mind assumes everyone else would do anything to win, no matter how unfair or underhanded. The corrupt mind assumes everyone else is also lawless and immoral. The vengeful mind assumes everyone else has the same bloodthirsty lusts.  

Trump is all that – narcissistic, partisan, corrupt and vengeful. And his feral shrewdness enables him to pluck those chords deep inside others. He serves as a huge permission slip to resentful people to let their worst instincts out of the cage, to abandon nuance, hesitation and shame as thoroughly as he has – apparently so successfully and joyously. Let’s don our red hats and Go!

From this flows his power to warp reality, to create the upside-down world of MAGA politics in which we all now live. His ability to accuse others of doing or plotting exactly the type of misdeeds that he is doing or plotting – and to make the accusation stick in the minds of millions – is nothing short of astonishing.   

Psychology calls this trait “projection.” The general idea is that the guilty mind seeks to project out onto others the deeds or dark desires that are causing inner shame, hoping to blunt that painful feeling. Trump is the GOAT of projection, the Tom Brady, the LeBron James, the Lionel Messi.

Except … it seems unlikely that, by this point, he is still spurred by any sense of shame. He has none now, whether he ever once did. He is simply a perpetual machine of projection, running day and night on an inexhaustible supply of ego.

This, in turn, may explain how he’s been able to warp reality, to turn words and facts on their heads like no other politician in the checkered history of this Republic. He has skewed meanings so thoroughly that many Americans no longer realize that certain words and phrases formerly connoted the exact opposite of what they are generally understood to mean now.

Here are a few examples, far from a full list:

Fake news

Trump now owns this phrase, which he deploys to discredit any legitimate news outlet that ever publishes a true, unflattering report on the things he does. He has used it so effectively to poison the wells that many of his followers reflexively dismiss any accurate reporting about his mistakes and misdeeds.

It’s hard to recall now, but this term was coined to describe the spurious “news” items that flooded social media during the 2016 election, most of which tended to damage Hillary Clinton and boost Donald Trump. These got widely posted and shared in the conservative media ecosystem, having a clear impact on the election.  For example: “Pope Francis shocks world, endorses Donald Trump for president” or “ISIS tells American Muslims to vote for Clinton.” The foul Pizzagate rumor also arose online and began spreading at this time.   

In other words, Trump has managed to take a phrase that used to denote false pro-Trump propaganda and turn it into a favorite weapon of pro-Trump propaganda.

A side note: Trump has also succeeded in convincing many Americans, and some forgetful journalists, that the fact that the Russian government, via its Internet Research Agency, actively aided his election campaign with fake news is not a fact at all, that it’s just a “hoax.” It is not. This absolutely happened – though it’s also clear that the Russian effort was only one among many and perhaps no more impactful than other “troll farms,” including one run as a money-making enterprise out of a small city in Macedonia called Veles.

Drain the swamp 

This one kind of stings, since back in the day I launched an editorial series at the Philadelphia Inquirer using this very phrase as its name. What we meant then by The Swamp – and what was generally understood – was this: the fetid morass of favor-trading, legal bribery and revolving-door conflict of interest populated in Washington by lobbying firms, think tanks and corporate advocacy groups, all of it represented by the label “K Street.”

When Trump campaigned in 2016 on a promise to drain the swamp, many thought he meant it the same way: Let’s clean up “K Street,” limit its self-interested and often malignant power over federal policy making.

But Trump meant nothing of the sort. As we now know, he adores quid pro quos, favor-trading and quiet but effective bribes. K Street is his kind of place.

No, the “swamp” he wants to drain is actually the part of the executive branch – in the Cabinet departments and the regulatory agencies – where earnest, modestly paid public servants try sincerely (if not always with perfect wisdom) to serve the public interest and uphold the Constitution.

This is not hyperbole. Read the man’s own campaign website. He’s open about his intention to wipe out the Civil Service, and staff all positions with his (dim-witted) loyalists. The unspoken part is that he would then gleefully tell all the swamp creatures of K-Street: Let the wild rumpus start.

Deep state

This Trumpian meaning-flip is closely related to the one above. Deep state, as originally coined, referred to secret, powerful networks that supposedly operate within government without democratic authorization, oversight or accountability.   In the U.S., before Trump, it often referred to suspected rogue elements in the spying, surveillance and military sectors. Think of that great Will Smith-Gene Hackman thriller, Enemy of the State.

Now, Trump and mouthpieces like Steve Bannon use the phrase to mean the mass of public servants who actually try to do their jobs in a legal and above-board way.  In other words, the pesky characters who often told Trump and his henchmen from 2017 to 2020: No, we can’t do that. That would be illegal, or unconstitutional, or unauthorized, or just wildly unwise.

Weaponize

The idea of weaponizing the power of government, particularly the Justice Department, to achieve illegal or purely partisan aims has been around a long time. That’s what Watergate was about and why even Republicans in Congress decided Richard Nixon had to go.    

It’s what Trump tried to get his first attorney general and first FBI director to do.  He fired them when they refused. And it’s what he explicitly, blatantly promises to do in a second term on his website.

Yet, now he’s got an entire major political party parroting his nonsensical claim that any step by any branch of our legal system – local, state or federal – to thwart his lawless ambitions or to hold him accountable for his legal deeds, constitutes – all together now! – weaponized justice.  

To Trump’s acolytes, somehow even the sober spectacle of the current president standing rigorously aside as his own Justice Department prosecutes and convicts his own son can somehow be spun as evidence of a nefarious Biden conspiracy to weaponize the courts.

The next popular term likely to get Trump’s upside-down-world treatment is “cheap fake,” a tech term now in the news because the Trump campaign has used it. They’ve deployed simple photoshopping and video editing tricks to create and spread misleading images about Biden’s supposed feebleness and dementia.

At a recent rally, Trump tried to begin his transformation of the term, to cast it as something the Biden campaign is doing to prop up their guy, a laWeekend at Bernie’s. But, in a sign of Trump’s own slippage, he screwed up, repeatedly calling the “cheap fake” technique a “clean fake.”

Don’t think for a second that the ensuing ridicule in the media will lead Trump to drop the effort. The humiliation will only fuel him to try harder. And his cult and his power-hungry acolytes will cheer as he does.

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Chris Satullo, a civic engagement consultant, is a former editorial page editor/columnist at The Philadelphia Inquirer, and a former vice president/news at WHYY public media in Philadelphia