Does he actually believe new immigrants are more prone to crime, as he claimed at his campaign announcement seven years ago next week? Does he actually believe any of the myriad other claims that had been fact-checked within weeks of that announcement? The tens of thousands of things that would be fact-checked by the time he left office? Or did he simply pretend to believe them? Was the truth in the middle, that he sort of believed them or convinced himself of them because it was useful to do so?
This has usually been an academic exercise, an exploration of Trump’s psychology. But in the wake of the attack at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, the exercise became more concrete.
The House select committee investigating that attack believes that Trump committed crimes in the wake of his 2020 election loss. One is obstruction of an official proceeding, working to block the counting of electoral votes that day. Another is conspiracy to defraud the United States, centered on his having tried to obstruct “lawful governmental functions.”
In each case, though, there’s a legal box to check. Trump must be shown to have tried to disrupt the transition of power to Joe Biden corruptly; that is, that he did so knowing that he had no right to do so. There’s a difference between breaking the window of a jewelry store to steal diamonds and breaking the window to help put out a fire.
Trump says there was a fire. Those who had been closest to him for the past seven years, we are increasingly...
PM Benjamin Netanyahu and Foreign Minister Gideon Sa'ar instructed officials to prepare a defamation lawsuit against "one of the most hideous and distorted lies ever published" on Israel. Israel wi...