Trump Is a Liar. That’s Bad. But He’s Delusional—and That’s Even Worse

Here we go again. The new oil deal with Venezuela, Donald Trump bragged over the weekend, will “substantially lower” gas prices and won’t cost the America taxpayer a dime. It’s historic. It’s yuge. It’s miraculous. So much winning. Hard to argue with in this case, right?

Actually, Ricardo Hausmann found these claims pretty easy to argue with after all. Hausmann is a professor of political economy at Harvard’s Kennedy School and a former planning minister and Central Bank board member of Venezuela. I’d call that pretty credentialed. Responding to a Marco Rubio tweet boasting about the deal, Hausmann wrote, in part:

Secretary Marco Rubio: You have just lost any trust Venezuelans ever had on [sic] you, and it will come to haunt you. You opted to use U.S. power not to free Venezuelans, but to go to bed with our oppressors … Venezuelans will not respect this illegitimate deal and no major U.S. oil company will take it seriously because they know it will not last.

Hausmann is not alone. Skeptics included, at least initially, Florida GOP Representative Maria Elvira Salazar, who tweeted: “Any oil ‘deal’ with Venezuela’s interim regime has an expiration date: the day President Trump leaves the White House.” She also called Venezuelan interim President Delcy Rodriguez an “acting dictator” and concluded: “No democracy. No lasting deal. Period.”

Ah, but we know how things work in today’s GOP. She quickly deleted that post, in both English and Spanish, and returned to X an hour later to write: “The U.S.-Venezuela oil deal is a great deal for the United States and the Venezuelan people.” Guess she’ll avoid a primary next election.

The Venezuela announcement tracks with a very well-worn pattern. Trump raves that the deal in question is the greatest in the annals of history. It will deliver scarcely imaginable benefits. It will cost nothing. And it all happened because of Trump’s genius.

It’s been a lie every time. The tariffs were going to help farmers. Nope: Farmers are furious at Trump, giving Democrats their first potential political opening in rural America in ages. The tariffs were going to allow for elimination of the income tax. Remember that one? The war in Iran was going to take a month. The Reflecting Pool, ruined by Trump’s predecessors, was going to be thing of unparalleled beauty.

It’s tempting to call these lies, and they surely were in the sense that Trump just says everything he does is the greatest without the slightest bit of analysis or conscience entering into the equation. But they’re not just lies. They’re delusions. And delusions, in a way, are even worse than lies.

Why? Because while a liar can change course, a delusional person cannot. Trump is sitting in the mid-to-low 30s in approval. If he were merely a liar, he could try to correct course and do some things differently. He could realize, for example, that the war he started has been a disaster and is massively unpopular and, without exactly admitting it directly, sue for peace and cut his losses. A liar can acknowledge, eventually, that maybe he screwed up a little on the Reflecting Pool.

But a delusionist can do none of those things because the delusionist can’t accept that he’s done anything wrong. And he surrounds himself with people who understand that their only real job, whatever their actual specific responsibilities may be, is to keep the delusions alive and the Emperor happy.

So: A normal president two months out from what’s shaping up as a devastating midterm election would try to do things a little differently. I’m not sure in this case what exactly that would be; releasing some of the petroleum reserve, bringing beef producers to the White House and pressing them to lower prices for a period. Anyway that’s Trump’s problem, not mine. The point is that he won’t do these things because he doesn’t think anything is wrong. In fact, his plan right now is to make himself the centerpiece of the GOP’s midterm message and to that end will reportedly redirect part of a $400 million kitty on “television advertisements about his own record.”

That record is delulu. He mocks affordability. He says the bad polls are fake. He blames everything on Joe Biden. He tells people the economy is roaring, everybody says so (yes, everybody at Mar-a-Lago probably does say so). He boasts, as he did at that rally 10 or so days ago, that the last 19 months have been the greatest first 19 months of any administration in history.

His aides must echo every word of this palaver or risk censure or termination. Ditto Republican elected officials, as Salazar no doubt learned swiftly and loudly after her first tweet. And ditto Republican office seekers, like the Senate candidate in Minnesota (net worth: between $17 and $33 million) who says people concerned about gas prices should “take one less trip to Starbucks.”

The GOP lives in a cocoon, woven by the gossamer threads of Trump’s fantasia. Reality does not penetrate it. It’s funny to watch. But it’s tragic because it’s affecting people’s lives. People are struggling and suffering. But to say that in the Emperor’s presence is to prove only that you’re a deep-stater or a stooge or a RINO.

So no—none of this is fixable. The economy will get worse. More and more innocent people, very much including children, will be rounded up and held in detention centers in the kind of hideous conditions we associate with a right- (or hard left-) wing dictatorship, not the United States of America. The jaw-dropping corruption will continue and will get worse and more desperate, as indeed it has nearly every month of this administration so far. The attempts to rig and steal the midterms will only get more blatant. And next year, the hideous aspects of the Big Ugly Bill, the ones they intentionally delayed until after the midterms, will kick in, like the massive Medicaid cuts, and poor people and those in nursing homes, among many others, will suffer even more.

Oh—and to return to Venezuela. The Associated Press reported over the weekend that there are many aspects of this deal we don’t know about. First of all, the U.S. government and “an unnamed private operator” formed a new company that was given the rights to 17 oil fields for 100 years. Gee, ya think maybe that operator is some kind of friend of Trump? Or maybe that Trump himself has a piece of the company?

Second, as was well known at the time of the U.S. coup, Venezuela’s oil infrastructure is in horrible shape and will take years to repair. So when will consumers start seeing this oil? As the AP put it, in its dry, neutral way: “A substantial boost in production is not expected to happen quickly.”

Third, it isn’t clear yet who will pay for these infrastructure improvements. Remember: Trump said this wouldn’t cost taxpayers any money. He said the same thing about the ballroom (current cost to taxpayers: around $300 million).

And fourth, it also isn’t clear how the U.S. oil industry will react. Oil companies will surely fret, and properly so, that the next president, if a Democrat, will cancel this. And there’s also the unstable situation in Venezuela itself. Salazar, before she censored herself, was correct—Delcy Rodriguez is an “acting dictator.” The actual winner of the last election, recognized by the Biden administration, was Edmundo Gonzales. But Victor Maduro stole it (Rodriguez was his vice president). And the current opposition leader, Maria Corina Machado, is in exile, having won the Nobel Peace Prize, and says she hopes to return to the country this year. Not exactly a stable investment climate.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that a year or so from now, we’ll learn that the operating partnership is corrupt, that infrastructure investments aren’t happening as promised, that the venture will have cost taxpayers money, and that U.S. oil firms don’t want any part of it. I hope I’m wrong about all those things. But history suggests otherwise.

And in that case, whoever the next Karoline Leavitt is will be standing up at that podium saying everything’s going beautifully, and Stephen Cheung will be “truthing” that the naysayers are a bunch of Marxist haters. Actually, the only person in this story who’s vaguely Marxist is Trump’s friend Delcy Rodriguez, whose Marxist guerilla father orchestrated the kidnaping of an American businessman in 1974. But never mind that. The Emperor is never wrong.