It's gone beyond narcissism. He's having a psychotic break. UPDATED

[localroger]

25. Consider the one statement

The out of work government employees are his biggest fans.

Usually when Trump lies you can see what he is trying to accomplish with the lie. But in this case, it is so absurd and counterproductive that there is no positive reason, by any kind of analysis, for him to say it. If he thinks opening the government without his wall would "make him look foolish", as he said yesterday, how the hell does he think this is supposed to work?

Not all breaks with reality consist of a giant bunny rabbit or President Lincoln talking to you. In the past it has seemed that Trump was perhaps calculating and evil, maybe going a little soft in the memory department because he can't keep his lies straight, but not this head-on off the edge of the real world. This feels different.

And yes, people do develop psychosis at any age; even as an amateur I know that. All kinds of things can cause a chemical imbalance in the nervous system which causes the brain to work wrong, with simple stress being one of the big ones; and your resistance to these external influences is one of the things that gets weaker as you age and it gets harder for your body to maintain its chemical equilibria. That's not even to mention drugs, and did you hear the one about "snorting lines of adderall?"

Psychosis can be induced by a number of factors other than natural occurrence, and I'm pretty sure this is what we're seeing here.