“Wittingly or not, Mr. Trump’s representatives have used a subtle psychological strategy to defend his falsehoods: They encourage people to reflect on how the falsehoods could have been true,” Effron wrote.
It’s through that lens that one might understand the statements made by Sanders, who — like her predecessors — is tasked with spinning the president’s tweeted and off-the-cuff remarks into the realm of reason. Last month, for example, she was asked by a reporter to justify Trump’s resurfaced claim that millions of Americans had participated in voter fraud in the 2016 election.
“The president still strongly feels that there was a large amount of voter fraud, and attempted to do a thorough review of it, but a lot of states didn’t want to cooperate or participate,” Sanders said from her White House podium. “We certainly know that there were a large number of instances reported, but we can’t be sure how much because we weren’t able to conduct a full review that the president wanted.”
So could Trump have convinced himself he wasn’t involved in Cohen’s payment to Stormy Daniels, or that he wasn’t the author of the medical report issued under Bornstein’s name, or that two of the three U.S. hostages in North Korea weren’t captured during his own term in office? Anything is possible, and no one can know for sure what’s in his mind.
But there’s a simpler explanation, and it doesn’t reflect well on him.