We’ve known this for a while now, but every accusation Donald makes is really a confession. He uses words like corrupt, crooked, fake, dishonest, criminal, incompetent, weak, crazy, rigged, and dumb to describe people he doesn’t like. He has used these words so often and for so long that they have become part of his shtick. They have also become part of the rhetoric of many of the people who still support him. How many times have we watched a congressional hearing in which somebody in Donald’s orbit is asked a direct question, only to watch them look down at their notes for the person or institution they’re supposed to blame in order to deflect instead of answering the question?
The pattern is unmistakable at this point. When confronted with an uncomfortable question, Donald or somebody in his orbit redirects the accusation outward. Sometimes they combine projection with deflection and attack the person who asked the question in the first place. Donald will tell a reporter that she doesn’t smile enough, call her piggy, or describe her as stupid, nasty, crooked, or corrupt. It’s all an effort to shift attention away from the question he doesn’t want to answer and the fact that he fails to answer it.
Projection is a very basic and quite common defense mechanism in which a person attributes thoughts, feelings, impulses, or characteristics they find unacceptable in themselves to somebody else. This isn’t hypocrisy, because projection is unconscious much of the time. It is literally outside of conscious awareness. When Donald says that somebody is stupid, has a low IQ, or is corrupt, criminal, or traitorous, he is literally talking about himself. He just isn’t aware of it because acknowledging those shortcomings in himself is unthinkable to him. To acknowledge them would be to admit that he is nothing he claims to be: smart, strong, sophisticated, and successful. The list goes on.
Projection is a way of making one’s problem somebody else’s problem. This is where the pattern of behavior matters. Again, it’s very common for people to get defensive and blame somebody else, especially when the thing about themselves is humiliating. But if a person repeatedly responds this way, we need to look more closely at what is happening.
As I discussed last week, Donald learned very early on that vulnerability, dependence, and failure were dangerous. How is that possible, you might ask? Well, his father, my grandfather Fred, divided the world into winners and losers, and he had deep seated contempt for people he considered losers, people like my dad. Being kind, empathetic, and sensitive, in addition to being vulnerable, also made you a loser in Fred Trump’s world.
What matters here is that Donald learned to deny those feelings and bury those characteristics that were intolerable to him. He knew that demonstrating them could get him literally and metaphorically killed, because that is exactly what he watched happen to my dad.
According to a Reuters investigation published in May 2026, Donald repeated his false claim that the 2020 election was stolen from him at least 107 times in just six months. Nearly six years after losing that election by almost eight million votes to Joe Biden, Donald is still obsessed with finding a way to undo his loss.
And just as a reminder, he also claimed that he won the popular vote in 2016. We know that, thanks to the tragedy of the Electoral College, Hillary Clinton won the popular vote in that election by three million votes. Donald just squeaked in because of the Electoral College, which, of course, benefits small red states. So even though he won, so to speak, the 2016 election thanks to the Electoral College, he could not bear to admit that he had lost the popular vote. That’s why he started claiming that more than three million undocumented workers had voted. If not for that, he would have won the popular vote, too.
Fake may be one of the most frequently used words in Donald’s vocabulary. According to the U.S. Press Freedom Tracker, he has used the phrase “fake news” at least 1,628 times on social media since 2015. Meanwhile, The Washington Post documented 30,573 false or misleading claims made by Donald during his first term, over four years. That’s an average of roughly 21 lies a day.
And I want to clarify something. Those are 21 lies a day that we know about, because who knows how many times he lies privately? So apparently, the easiest way to deal with an inconvenient fact, if you’re Donald, is to declare that the person repeating it is a liar or to make claims about that person that actually apply to you.
We’re talking about people like Jack Smith, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Barack Obama, and Letitia James. These are some of the people Donald has accused of criminal wrongdoing or suggested belong in prison.
Again, as I often say to him, Donald, stop looking in a mirror when you say these things. In June 2023, ABC News identified at least 27 political adversaries whom Donald had publicly suggested should be indicted or jailed since launching his first presidential campaign. When Donald himself faces criminal investigations, it’s the investigators who are criminals. The prosecutors pursuing those investigations are criminals, and the judges who rule against him according to the rule of law are the corrupt ones.
Donald can never be the bad guy in his own mind. He is full of grievance. He is the perpetual victim, and the rest of us can never, ever, ever be allowed to forget it.
So what happens when one person is unable to face reality? Donald doesn’t have to convince the entire country that his delusional framework is true, because the truth of the matter is that he is really just trying to convince himself. Unfortunately, there is a significant minority of people who are willing to go along with that delusional framework, in part because he is also an expert at convincing some very weak people, sometimes in very subtle ways, that they are responsible for assuaging his pain and supporting him no matter what.
They continue to support him even when doing so is to the detriment of their country and, quite frankly, to their own detriment.
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There is a saying in the Corrections Industry that succinctly describes the oft noted excuses used by the guilty: “There is no problem so big that I cannot blame it on somebody else.” Unlike projection, it IS conscious and is always a Hail Mary Pass. Donald KNOWS he is lying and is quite expert in shifting blame as sociopaths and Cluster B traited individuals demonstrate because it works. It is a Conscious Narrative that one must always be a victim to support the internal narrative that he is a GOOD GUY and his enemies are Bad Guys. Always need a fresh supply of Bad Guys to support the story. But I don’t think for a second that this is an unconscious process but is Page 1 of the Sociopath’s How To Get Away With Everything Handbook. He. knows, he’s. lying.