Is Trump lying, or is he just that deluded?

Donald Trump’s lies took on the look of fevered hallucinations last week.

First, Trump falsely claimed that his rallies have more attendees than Harris-Walz rallies. 

To counter evidence of television camera shots of the big crowds, he said it was an illusion, all computer-generated by some evil hand.

Second, Trump claimed to have once been in a near-death helicopter crash with former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown, where Brown confided to him “terrible things” about his one-time protege Harris in what they thought would be their final moments alive on Earth.

Brown says Trump is lost in a crazed fantasy because this never happened.

Third, Trump held up two boxes of TicTac candy to falsely claim that inflation has ballooned grocery prices by “50, 60, even 100 percent in some cases,” despite official, publicly available statistics showing the rise has been closer to 20 percent.

And since he is running in a 2024 campaign, the most pertinent fact is that inflation has slowed and just hit its lowest mark since 2021.

But Trump is selling his followers a fantasy in which the only truth is what Trump says is the truth.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has a theory about this blizzard of lies. The Trump show, Sanders suggests, has shifted from mocking liberals and getting laughs with belittling nicknames for GOP rivals. The new Trump show features a magical guarantee of a Trump victory in November.  And Trump is warning his followers to ignore anyone who says he is losing. 

“Clearly, and dangerously, what Trump is doing is laying the groundwork for rejecting the election results if he loses,” Sanders explains.

“If you can convince your supporters that thousands of people who attended a televised rally do not exist, it will not be hard to convince them that the election returns in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and elsewhere are ‘fake’ and ‘fraudulent.’

“This is what undermining democracy is about,” Sanders said, “this is what fascism is about.” 

There is good reason to think Sanders hit the nail on the head. Recall that as far back as his 2016 debate with Hillary Clinton, he incredibly refused to commit to accepting the results of the election, in which he ultimately lost the popular vote. 

And that same insistence on his own version of reality led Trump to refuse to accept his loss in the 2020 election.

Trump’s recent rants on social media and at rallies fit with the idea that he is creating a new grand illusion for this November. For example, he claims with no evidence that Democrats are to blame for the assassination attempt on him. But the shooter was a registered Republican.

In another feverish claim, Trump recently announced that President “Biden never had COVID — He is a threat to Democracy!”

Connecting the lines in Trump’s thinking can be a challenge. But his claim about Biden never having COVID suggests that shadowy, manipulative figures already forced Biden out of the race because Trump was beating him, and that a similar shadowy conspiracy will not allow him to win the presidential race in November.

He wants his fans to believe he is the only source of truth. This extends to defining his opponent. Famously, he made the insulting claim that he knows Kamala Harris’s race better than she does because “I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago when she happened to turn Black…”

He advises his followers to ignore that she was born to an Indian mother and Black Jamaican father, attended a historically Black college and entered a Black sorority.

This nonsense is a reminder of the power of Trump’s false claim that President Obama’s birth certificate was fraudulent and that the first Black president wrongly held the office because he was not born in the U.S. 

Trump’s latest series of lies comes as he faces Kamala Harris’s surging poll numbers in key battleground states. She is also closing the gap in red states like Florida and Texas.

She has been the Democratic nominee for only two weeks.

Harris is running a rising political campaign, and Trump is flailing in deep political water as the new candidate swims past him. Trump’s disturbing and quick descent into selling political illusion calls to mind his one-time GOP rival Nikki Haley’s call for mandatory mental competency tests for politicians over 75 years old.

Toward the end of her primary campaign earlier this year, Haley pointed out that in speeches during the GOP primaries, Trump called her Nancy Pelosi, a reviled figure for Trump. That might have been an intentional step to get his followers to view Haley as they viewed Pelosi.

Trump’s recent crop of fantastic lies suggests he is unlikely to fare well in any mental competency test. But that shouldn’t obscure that Trump’s assault on truth is dangerous. 

I recently celebrated my 70th birthday with my family on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. If in this column, I declared that tens of thousands of people were at my birthday party and that rainbow-colored dolphins joined the festivities, my editor would no longer let me write this column. 

Why is a 78-year-old presidential candidate held to a different and lower standard than a 70-year-old ink-stained newspaperman?

Juan Williams is an author and a political analyst for Fox News Channel.