From Maureen Dowd in a recent panel discussion:
“Trump’s greatest wizardry is creating this dark plane of unreality, and that’s how he got to be president again, where people believe what he’s saying, even if it runs counter to fact. But there have been some new things this week where he is having less success with. For example, where he kept saying that they’ve been talking to China, and clearly they haven’t. So Trump is getting caught in a lie. And they asked Scott Bessent about it and then he got impatient and said: I’m not running the switchboard at the White House. And he can’t lie, but he can’t back up Trump. And as David Axelrod says, this is reality, it’s not a reality show as Trump likes to treat it.”