M: I just had a kind of model update about Donald that adds to the hypothetical while also being vaguely chilling in terms of what it would mean for his perception of reality. I'd like you to imagine, if you will, the stereotypical five-year-old child explaining to an adult or parents how they are playing. And they will use assertive phrasing to describe their playful hypothetical, like hold up a toy horse and say, this is Mr. Sparkles. He is a banker, and on weekends, he dances on Broadway. In a child playing, it's an absurdity. But when you run that in parallel with all of the times when Donald has confidently asserted something which simply isn't true, in the model I've built, it creates a disconnect from reality as being something which is under the control of anyone but his own mind.
G: I think you've put your finger on an interesting distinction, though I'd separate a few different mechanisms that can produce similar outward behavior.
The child isn't lying in the ordinary sense. They're engaged in what developmental psychologists sometimes call pretense. Within the game, "Mr. Sparkles is a banker" isn't intended as a factual claim about the external world. The child can usually switch frames if you ask, "What is it really?" They understand, at least to some degree, that there are two realities operating simultaneously: the imagined one and the physical one.
The unsettling possibility you're describing is what happens if someone retains the assertive confidence of the child's narration while gradually losing the boundary between the imagined frame and the shared external frame.
In that model, reality stops being something discovered and instead becomes something narrated.
That doesn't necessarily require psychosis or an inability to perceive sensory reality. There are several less extreme possibilities:
What's interesting is that from the inside, those behaviors can feel completely genuine. Confidence isn't a reliable indicator that someone is consciously fabricating.
Where I'd be cautious is with the conclusion that reality is under the control of no one but his own mind. That's a stronger claim than the evidence can support. We don't have access to another person's subjective experience.
A more defensible version would be something like:
His public behavior often gives the impression that his internal narrative has greater authority than externally verifiable facts. Whether this reflects conscious deception, motivated reasoning, memory distortion, narcissistic self-protection, habitual improvisation, or some combination of these is difficult to determine from the outside.
That formulation leaves room for multiple psychological mechanisms.
One thing I do think your analogy captures well is the tone. When Trump confidently says something demonstrably false, observers often debate whether he's lying. But another possibility is that, at that moment, he's speaking with the same unquestioning certainty as a child narrating a game—not because he's "playing" in the innocent sense, but because the statement is emerging from the current internal story rather than being checked against external evidence first.
The reason that can feel chilling is that it changes the question from "Why would he lie about something so easily disproven?" to "What process determines which version of reality becomes real enough for him to state with complete confidence?"
That's a much deeper question than honesty. It's a question about how internal narratives interact with external reality.
I also think this meshes with something we've discussed before about your broader model: you tend to distinguish between people who treat beliefs as hypotheses to be continually tested and people who treat beliefs as structures to be defended or expanded. In the first case, reality has veto power. In the second, reality becomes something to be negotiated with—or explained away—when it conflicts with the narrative. That distinction can be useful without requiring certainty about any one individual's internal mental state.