Reading the News with Perplexity
“Right. It was a horrible day. It should have never happened. It would never have happened, guaranteed. Even Democrats admit it. I saw some Congressman the other day. He said that wouldn’t have happened. And whether we like it or not, the attack by Russia on Ukraine would not have happened. But it did happen, and it happened as bad as there was, it was just an incredibly bad thing. And it will get straightened out. It’s been amazing to see what’s happening now but it’ll get straightened out, Hugh” (Donald Trump, 10/7/2024).
Hugh Hewitt, the conservative podcaster who was a lawyer in a previous life, invited Donald Trump to have a conversation on the one year anniversary of the Hamas attack on Israel. Hewitt opened the podcast by thanking Mr. Trump for appearing, especially on the anniversary of that “horrible day.”
“Right,” said Mr. Trump, followed by his predictable self-glorification. By the way, I used Perplexity AI to search the web for information related to this Hewitt podcast to develop this post and pulled in the transcript of Hewitt’s talk available at the url in the opening quote. Perplexity came strong on the scene in 2024 and offers a hybrid search bot that I use almost every day. I could have found it with Google or Yahoo, but Perplexity is much more efficient and functional. From the website:
“Perplexity AI is an AI-powered search engine that strives to make knowledge as accessible as possible. Sitting somewhere in between AI chatbots and traditional search engines, Perplexity AI responds to user-based queries with succinct, relevant answers, offering more citations and image responses than tools like ChatGPT, and reducing the need to wade through links like you do with Google [emphasis added].”
My interest in Hewitt’s podcast came from watching a CNN clip elaborating on the significance of a, what, lie (?) that Trump uttered during the podcast, claiming he had visited Gaza. Shortly after the podcast, the New York Times searched and found no evidence that Trump was ever in Gaza.
The pundits on CNN were discussing the import of this situation—did Trump believe he had been to Gaza? Did he know he had never been there? Was he confused about the geopolitical formation of Gaza? Recalling media attention paid when special counsel Robert Hur, who described Biden as a “well-meaning, elderly man with a fading memory,” refused to change his report to the Department of Justice, I wanted to dig deeper into available information. Could Donald Trump be another “well-meaning elderly man with a fading memory?” As I’ve done before, I turned to Perplexity.
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My goal changed a bit once I pulled up the Hewitt webpage and read the transcript of the podcast, using methods of reading I developed using critical discourse analysis theory. Trump’s words above on both the Hamas attack and the Russian invasion—”It should not have happened”—and would not have happened, he said, struck me as absurdly arrogant. I was reminded of Humpty Dumpty before the great fall.
I’ve heard him say this dozens of times, but this time in the context of two ongoing wars (Israel, Ukraine) being waged by two authoritarians (Netanyahu, Putin) also suffering from “delusions of grandeur,” I considered seriously whether some Psych Manual mental illness of long-standing had driven Trump completely over the line into a fantasy world he thinks of as life.
I asked Perplexity to provide me with scholarly work on “delusions of grandeur,” and I read some about the topic—not enough to be expert, but enough not to be completely ignorant. Then I set to examining Trump’s words through this hastily assembled lens. Does he have delusions of grandeur? Or is he Jesus Christ?
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Sure enough. Individuals suffering from delusions of grandeur tend to make absolute statements. Trump uses phrases like "It would never have happened, guaranteed." His level of certainty about his control over complex geopolitical events reveals a deep disconnect from reality in his brain. During the debate with Harris he said: "The war would never have happened if I had been president... Putin would never have entered Ukraine."
Inflating the power of personal influence also clusters among the features of “delusions of grandeur.” Why would the war never have happened? Trump had personal influence. Why will he end the Ukrainian war even before he takes office if he is elected this coming November? The power of Him. The implication that his presence in office would have prevented both the Hamas attack and Russia's invasion of Ukraine coupled with his insistence that he can end both wars reveals a recalcitrant inflated sense of his personal importance, the immense power of his personality on the world stage. He sees himself as a savior.
The statement "It will get straightened out" suggests a simplistic view of the world consistent with delusions of grandeur. Individuals who ignore or distort the world—Steve Jobs called it the “reality distortion mechanism” according to Walter Isaacson—see themselves as among the chosen few with the rare ability to cut through the crap and get to the crux of the matter. Donald Trump has never seen a crux he couldn’t crack whether it’s climate change, immigration, war and peace, or election integrity.
Being ‘unique’ shows up among the traits of the deluded grandeur mindset. Self-positioning as a unique problem-solver, for example, the guru of the deal, implies that he is blessed with special abilities. He doesn’t need the CIA. He doesn’t need a Secretary of State. He doesn’t need daily briefings. One special talent is “thinking big”: “If you’re going to be thinking anyway, you might as well think big.” Doesn’t this uniqueness seem inherently related to the tendency to oversimplify and wind up thinking small?
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Against this backdrop of delusions of grandeur, I found the following lines from the podcast interesting and revealing:
HH: You know how to build things. Gaza is in ruins. Could Gaza be Monaco if it was rebuilt the right way? Could someone make Gaza into something that all the Palestinian people would be proud of, would want to live in, would benefit them?
DT: It could be better than Monaco. It has the best location in the Middle East, the best water, the best everything. It’s got, it is the best, I’ve said it for years. You know, I’ve been there, and it’s rough. It’s a rough place, before the, you know, before all of the attacks and before the back and forth what’s happened over the last couple of years.
It’s the “I’ve been there” comment that drew the attention of the New York Times and others. No one from the Trump campaign has provided evidence that Trump ever visited Gaza. He has visited Israel, however, and those sympathetic to him explain that he may not have meant “I’ve been there” to mean he was actually, physically in Gaza. I see, said Alice in Wonderland.
It’s harder to explain his elaborations on the water front property and the real estate potentials. Those less sympathetic explain that he may have had a brain fart and believed a false statement to be true—in the same way he might have fantasized that his quid pro quo with Zelentsky was good for the country because it would be good for his reelection. He, the savior, was needed by his people.
Alan Dershowitz, during the first impeachment trial of Donald Trump, made an argument that a president could lawfully act in ways that might benefit their political future. He stated, "If a president does something which he believes will help him get elected, in the public interest, that cannot be the kind of quid pro quo that results in impeachment." You likely recall the condemnation that rained down upon this well-known lawyer. Dershowitz, of course, defended himself:
“Let me be clear once again,” Dershowitz said. “A president seeking re-election cannot do anything he wants. He is not above the law. He cannot commit crimes. He cannot commit impeachable conduct. But a lawful act— holding up funds, sending troops to vote, braking a promise about Syria — does not become unlawful or impeachable if done with a mixed motive of both promoting the public interest and helping his RE-election. Please respond to my argument, not a distortion of it.”
On July 1, 2024, the Supreme Court decided on the issue of Presidential immunity and concluded that Dershowitz was mostly right. A president is not above the law. A president cannot commit crimes while in office. But… sometimes a president makes official acts as the executive officer which are immune from criminal prosecution if the president was acting with the intention of doing official business as the president understood it. Clearly, when Trump asked for his quid pro quo from Zelensky, he was acting on official business in an official capacity. But what does it mean for a savior to have an “official capacity?”
“We accordingly remand to the District Court to determine in the first instance — with the benefit of briefing we lack — whether Trump’s conduct in this area [the breach of Congress on January 6] qualifies as official or unofficial,” wrote Roberts, who said there was a lack of “factual analysis” in the previous lower court opinions rejecting Trump’s immunity.