We're living in Trump's dream world

The news, in brief …

• Stephen Miller managing Venezuela airstrikes in new drug war

  Miller is helping direct "lawless" airstrikes on boats from Venezuela, The Guardian reports. Read more.

• DNC backs drive for Missouri gerrymandering referendum

  The Democratic National Committee said it's supporting an effort to put the Missouri GOP's new map up for a vote. Read more.

Make me smarter …

RFK Jr.’s Tylenol attack insults women’s intelligence

Kennedy's tactics are straight out of the anti-abortion movement's playbook. Read more.

Making fake news real

Medbeds are not real and they cannot help you. But does the literal president of the United States know that?

That was the question that Americans who remain grounded in reality were forced to ask themselves when a 79-year-old man (with the nuclear codes) shared a post on Truth Social in which an AI-generated version of himself, speaking on an AI-generated segment of Fox News, offered all Americans — the Republican ones, at least — a miraculous healing technology that does not exist.

“Every American will soon receive their own medbed card,” the Trump who isn’t real said in the video shared by the Trump who is. “With it, you’ll have guaranteed access to our new hospitals led by the top doctors in the nation, equipped with the most advanced technology in the world.”

So, I have questions: Why would this secret-no-more alien technology require entirely new hospitals? That doesn’t make a lot of sense; they’re beds. The conspiracy theory goes that these are cure-all contraptions are already being used by the deep state to secretly keep “dead” presidents alive — wouldn’t they, then, be utilizing existing infrastructure? And wouldn’t Joe Biden have used one before his last debate? Let’s think this through. But also, seriously: Another membership card?

Trump, the real person, later deleted the post. But as Salon’s Sophia Tesfaye noted, it’s far from the only recent example of the U.S. president — the man who purports to be in charge of everything — displaying a concerning lack of familiarity with the world as it exists.

Take Portland, Oregon, which the president insists is currently being ravaged by “war.” Is it? No, it is not.

Ah! But Fox News does like to play the same two to three clips of things on fire the last time Trump was president. And if the president watches those clips, and deploys soldiers in response, is the fact that it’s all basically fake and made up really matter? What’s definitely real is that the deployment of lethal force, on the word of perhaps the world’s least-qualified man, and the fact that this has become all but normal in a matter of a few months.

Trump, it would appear, creates his own truth before drifting off to sleep. And what’s truly nightmarish is not that one old man inhabits a distorted reality, but just how many others believe we ought to live in it too.

Is Trump losing his connection with reality? Or is he just feeding slop to the fans? And how would we know the difference? Sound off in the comments.

Support our bold journalism: Become a Salon member today.

Before you go …

Ghost tourism profits on death while dancing on the graves of those who died

America’s booming ghost-tourism industry is a bizarre inversion of its discomfort with death. Read more.

ALSO FROM SALON