Any time David Roth writes an essay on Trump, do yourself a favor and read every word. This man is a poet.
https://theconcourse.deadspin.com/you-cant-get-there-from-here-1831622949
Some highlights:
“It’s not going to change a damn thing,” the President of the United States told an assemblage of news anchors at an off-the-record White House meeting some weeks ago. “But I’m still doing it.” To a certain extent, that groaning is just standard Trump shit—his signature all-caps triumphalism is balanced by an equal and opposite tendency towards teenish mopery when he doesn’t get what he wants fast enough, or hot enough, or served with proper deference. But there was something a bit different about this. He was referring to a trip he’d make to the Rio Grande Valley later that week, during the early-middle part of the 35-day federal government shutdown, at the point when various assholes were putting on barn jackets and getting themselves photographed squinting at arroyos outside of McAllen, Texas.
...He believes the bit about the smugglers and the duct tape because he believes it, and because he believes it now he will never stop believing it. In the last days of the shutdown, Trump and members of his cabinet explained, with the blithe confidence God gives only to people who have never considered the possibility that they might be wrong, that furloughed government employees could simply “work something out” with their local grocers and debt-collection agencies. When he says something confusing or stupid or glaringly wrong—something that can’t be explained by any existing set of facts or system of beliefs, something that even the embalmed-looking juche vendors on his favorite television channels haven’t dared put up for sale—it’s because he believes it.
...even before he banged his own personal left turn and began his full-tilt drive into the desert of cognitive decline, Trump was not an especially nuanced or strategic person. His mind is not what it was, and at its peak it was more of a Magic 8 Ball than a supercomputer. He can’t learn anything because he can’t listen to other people if they aren’t speaking from inside a television; he can’t remember what he hears there because he can’t really care unless it’s about him. These deficits are clear when Trump is extemporizing on furloughed workers cutting deals with the milkman or imagining cartoon coyotes piloting sedans full of duct-taped women across the Rio Grande, but they are even clearer when he tells knowing lies. The former tend to be about other people, and so tend to be both lurid and half-assed; he only really ever applies himself when the lies involve himself.
...His lies, though, are more elemental. They are never anything more than the opposite of truth. If Trump keeps insisting that he’s not being investigated for his relationship to Russia in gratuitous and unconvincing ways, it’s not because he’s trying to leverage some advanced placement Dealpoint or exploit some hidden businessman’s trick or angle. It’s because he’s literally fucking being investigated for his relationship with Russia and because he very much wants people to think he’s not, and because that’s honestly the best he can do because his brain is an old donut bobbing around in a toilet.