Reality isn't what it used to be

S E E D E D   C O N T E N T

By Paul Campos / On July 30, 2026 

Via Krugman, I learned that last week Trump gave an unhinged utterly delusional talk at the EPA, full of hallucinatory claims that sounded exactly like the kinds of things an increasingly demented grandpa might say, while everybody just sort of nods and cringes. CNN actually reported on this, although most major news sources ignored it altogether or buried it:

President Donald Trump asked Americans on Thursday if they remembered a massive television outage two years ago.

That outage didn't happen. As he has before, the president who is fond of telling imaginary tales was explicitly asking people to recall something he had made up.

This time, Trump's fictional story was about wind energy. He has for years railed against it, tried to thwart it and made falseclaims about it - including a phony anecdote about how, in places where wind power is used, people can't turn on their TVs when the wind isn't blowing.

That isn't true; wind is used as part of a mix of electricity sources, not as the only source, so the grid keeps running and TVs stay on even when there is no breeze. (Also, there are batteries that can store energy from wind turbines for deployment during low-wind periods.) But Trump has often delivered the no-TV story with a comedic touch that has allowed it to skirt fact checks.

In his Thursday remarks at the Environmental Protection Agency in Washington, he told it mostly as if it were a real reminiscence.

He denounced "the Green New Scam, where we were scammed." Then he said: "The whole country was - I wasn't scammed. I got it right from the beginning; I got it from the first minute when I heard this crap. You know? They were saying wind was so wonderful, so wonderful, except you couldn't watch your television. They wanted to watch the debate, Donald Trump against Sleepy Joe Biden. Nobody could watch it because the wind wasn't blowing. Remember that? 'Darling, we'd like to watch the debate tonight.' 'I'm sorry, the wind isn't blowing.'"

Uh, no.

Tens of millions of Americans watched his June 2024 debate with then-President Joe Biden - more than 51 million on television alone, according to Nielsen estimates. The viewers, of course, included people in the state that produced by far the most wind-powered electricity in 2024 and still produces by far the most today…Republican-dominated Texas, which is also the most populous state Trump won.

Trump's wind story wasn't the only fictional tale he told at the Thursday event. He also claimed California has "brownouts and blackouts every weekend," which is simply not true; he has been making similar false claims about California for years.

A spokesperson for Gov. Gavin Newsom said in a Friday email that "there hasn't been a rolling blackout in nearly six years in California" and that "California's grid hasn't had to call for any emergency conservation through the Flex Alert program since 2022, which is proof that the state's investment in clean energy and battery storage is paying off."

And Trump lamented, twice, that he gets "no credit" for the US having received "$19.2 trillion" in investment in just his first 12 months back in office. He doesn't get such credit because the US hasn't actually received anywhere close to $19.2 trillion in investment during this presidential term, let alone take in that much during the first year of the term; as we've repeatedly explained, Trump's figure is a fabrication even the White House can't substantiate.

And so on and so on and so on.

Krugman points out this is all just classic totalitarian epistemology, not just demented grandpa rambling again, although it's that, too:

The Covid vaccine didn't work, and vaccines cause autism. But hydroxychloroquine worked, and so did ivermectin. Anthony Fauci killed millions of people.

Climate change is a hoax. Wind power caused a massive TV blackout during the Trump-Biden debate. Solar power is useless because the sun doesn't shine at night, and batteries don't exist. Smoke blanketed North America, not because of climate change, but because Canada didn't rake its 2 million square miles of boreal forest.

We've destroyed Iran's military, and the Iranian regime is begging for a deal. Also, the U.S. isn't running out of precision weapons as a result of the Iran war, and furthermore the shortage is Joe Biden's fault.

The economy is in a "golden age." Prices are down. And Trump has a 59 percent approval rating.

Trump won the 2020 election.

Communism is the greatest threat facing America. . . .

If believing something suits MAGA's prejudices and interests, they don't hesitate: they simply insist that it's true. They routinely dismiss scientific and statistical evidence, but they don't stop there. They're perfectly willing to deny reality even if the truth is staring them in the face. . . .

Do Trump and his followers actually believe these things? As I see it, that's a category error, starting from the presumption that they even accept that objective facts exist. All the evidence (Hah! "Evidence!") says that they don't.

Krugman notes this is all very Orwellian, and that while America in 2026 isn't a totalitarian society, MAGA absolutely is a totalitarian movement, psychologically speaking.

This is why calls for more intellectual diversity, and less "political correctness," or "wokeness" or what have you in academia, the media, and other venues of serious public debate are, under current political conditions in America, basically perverse. You can't debate, say, the costs and benefits of government policies during the Covid pandemic with people who don't believe that the Covid vaccines worked. You can't debate the costs and benefits of various measures to ameliorate climate change with people who deny human-caused climate change is happening at all. You can't debate optimal policies for dealing with transgender athletes in competitions with people who deny that transgender people exist. When such views represent the current orthodoxy within the political party that now controls the American government, political debate with one's opponents is a waste of time, because those opponents have no allegiance to even the most minimal intellectual standards. Such people can and do say absolutely anything with no regard to whether what they are saying tracks with essentially effeminate considerations such as evidence or logic or rational coherence.

From The Triumph of Stupidity.