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<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/donald-trump/" target="_blank" class="contextual_link">Donald Trump</a> caused a minor kerfuffle this week when he styled himself “a Modern Day Nelson Mandela.”

Specifically, the former president <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/04/06/donald-trump-gag-order-merchan/" target=_blank>saw a common thread</a> connecting the beloved anti-apartheid icon’s 27 years in prison and his own trial, beginning Monday, over hush money paid to an adult-film actress.

“He is definitely delusional,” Zwelivelile “Mandla” Mandela, grandson of the great man, <a href="https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/donald-trump-delusional-for-comparing-himself-to-mandela-family-say-7q507f7f7" target="_blank">told the Times of London</a>.

Delusional, maybe — but also modest! Mandla Mandela must not have realized that Trump, in comparing himself with one of the towering figures of the 20th century, was in fact demoting himself. A couple of weeks earlier, Trump had shared a post on his social media site that <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/03/29/trump-collective-amnesia-campaign-strategy/" target=_blank>likened him to Jesus</a>.

Matt McClain

A humble Trump said this week on Truth Social that it would be a “<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/04/06/donald-trump-gag-order-merchan/" target=_blank>GREAT HONOR</a>,” to be a modern Mandela. (Back in October, he<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7c7ExKTocVs" target=_blank> had said dismissively</a> that “I don’t mind being Nelson Mandela.”) But this honor apparently wasn’t great enough. Two days later, Trump suggested in an interview that he is even greater than the Great Emancipator, Abraham Lincoln, though he had been advised not to say so publicly.

Trump explained to his host on the MAGA outlet Real America’s Voice that “nobody’s done more than I have” for Black people. “I say nobody’s done more since Abraham Lincoln,” he elaborated. “I actually wanted to go beyond Abraham Lincoln, but some people thought that wasn’t a good thing to do.”

To borrow a Lincoln phrase (Trump has the “<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/video/national/trump-i-have-the-best-words/2017/04/05/53a9ae4a-19fd-11e7-8598-9a99da559f9e_video.html" target=_blank>best words</a>,” but Lincoln’s were pretty good, too), it is altogether fitting and proper for Trump to compare himself with a Civil War-era leader. This is because, thanks largely to Trump, the rights of American women have just been returned to where they were 160 years ago.

Trump accurately boasts that “I was able to kill Roe v. Wade” and “I was proudly the person responsible.” As a result of his achievement, conservatives on Arizona’s Supreme Court, freed by Roe’s demise, resurrected on Tuesday an 1864 law that <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/04/09/trump-abortion-arizona-court-decision/" target=_blank>bans nearly all abortions,</a> even in cases of rape and incest, from the moment of conception. Trump invited just such Wild West jurisprudence the day before when he said abortion policy should be left “up to the states.” Now, Arizona has restored women’s health care to an era when bloodletting and mercury pills were the standard of care and patients had limbs sawed off without anesthesia.

Maybe Trump should stick with the Mandela comparison. After all, the similarities are uncanny!

Mandela led the African National Congress. Trump led white nationalists to attack Congress.

Mandela did 18 years of hard labor on Robben Island. Trump made the hard decisions for 14 seasons on “The Apprentice.”

Mandela won the Nobel Peace Prize with F.W. de Klerk for abolishing apartheid. <a href="https://golfweek.usatoday.com/2024/03/27/donald-trump-claims-two-more-golf-championships-trump-international-west-palm-beach/" target=_blank>Trump won</a> both the Club Championship trophy and Senior Club Championship trophy at Trump International Golf Club.

Mandela built the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to heal South Africa. Trump built Truth Social after he got kicked off of Twitter.

But dare we hope that Trump, on his Long Walk to Megalomania, might pause to think about what Mandela actually represented?

While Trump, like Stalin, calls the press “the enemy of the people,” Mandela <a href="https://www.nelsonmandela.org/selected-quotes" target=_blank>argued</a> that “a critical, independent and investigative press is the lifeblood of any democracy.”

While Trump fans racial resentment and cultural paranoia, Mandela <a href="https://www.britannica.com/list/nelson-mandela-quotes" target=_blank>taught us:</a> “It is not our diversity which divides us; it is not our ethnicity, or religion or culture that divides us. Since we have achieved our freedom, there can only be one division amongst us: between those who cherish democracy and those who do not.”

In that struggle of our time between democracy and its opponents, Trump is heir not to Mandela but to his jailers.

Edward M Pio Roda

Just hours after wrapping himself in the mantle of Mandela, Trump revisited <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-attacks-protections-for-immigrants-from-shithole-countries-in-oval-office-meeting/2018/01/11/bfc0725c-f711-11e7-91af-31ac729add94_story.html" target="_blank">his assertion in 2018</a> that African nations (along with Haiti and El Salvador) were “s---hole countries.” At a fundraiser at a hedge fund billionaire’s home in Palm Beach, Fla., where Trump <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/04/06/trump-fundraising-dinner/" target="_blank">raised a reported $50 million</a> for his campaign, the GOP and his legal defense, Trump said that others took his remarks as “a very terrible comment, but <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/07/us/politics/trump-immigrants-nice-countries.html" target="_blank">I felt it was fine.”</a>

The New York Times’s <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/07/us/politics/trump-immigrants-nice-countries.html" target=_blank>Maggie Haberman and Michael Gold reported</a> that, at the closed-door event (during which he promised the high rollers more tax cuts), Trump complained about immigrants “coming in from just unbelievable places and countries, countries that are a disaster.” He reiterated his desire to welcome immigrants from Denmark, Switzerland and Norway rather than from places such as Yemen, “where they’re blowing each other up all over the place.”

In his interview the next day with Real America’s Voice, the modern-day Mandela again raised fears of dangerous, dark-skinned invaders. Without evidence, he informed his host that “they came in last night: numerous people from the Congo in Africa. They came in from the Congo. They were in jail in the Congo and now they’re living a beautiful life in the United States.”

The truly historic nature of Trump’s many assertions of his own greatness is that he can portray himself as Mandela, or Jesus, or Lincoln or <a href="https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-navalny-russia-putin-2024-indictments-71513abe8f128ab885d9d2382f92e9d6" target=_blank>Alexei Navalny</a> (which he has also done), and a significant proportion of his followers will believe it. A Post-Schar School poll shows just how deep this pathology runs.

As Post Fact Checker Glenn Kessler and pollsters Scott Clement and Emily Guskin report, Trump’s supporters have become substantially <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/04/09/some-trump-falsehoods-stick-more-than-others-fact-checker-poll-finds/" target=_blank>more persuaded by disinformation</a> than they were six years ago. They are more likely to say today that the 2016 election was marred by millions of fraudulent votes and that Russia did not interfere in that election — both demonstrably untrue. A majority of strong Trump supporters today believe his provably false assertions that <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/elections/candidates/joe-biden-2024/" target="_blank" class="contextual_link">Joe Biden</a> won the 2020 election because of fraud, that the United States funds most of NATO’s budget and that global temperatures are rising because of natural, not human, causes. Though only 28 percent of Americans believe Trump’s false claims on average, those who list Fox News as a primary news source are 13 percentage points more likely to accept the disinformation as true.

And Fox News is a paragon of journalistic integrity compared with the darker corners of the MAGA media landscape. Listening to Trump’s 10-minute interview with Real America’s Voice, I realized the host, Wayne Root — who was having his fifteenth interview with Trump — <a href="https://x.com/RealAmVoice/status/1777520557396787464" target=_blank>sounded even more bonkers than his subject,</a> which is saying something.

Shouting into the camera, Root told Trump that his noncommittal statement on <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/abortion/" target="_blank" class="contextual_link">abortion</a> policy (leave it to the states) took the issue “off the table! You’re brilliant! This is the perfect answer!” He went on to say that Americans have “been lied to about inflation, jobs reports, crime, the open border.” Democrats who support Biden “hate the Jews” and “hate the police and they support the criminals.” Jews should like Trump because “he makes us prosperous.” Inflation, as high as 9 percent in 2022, has eased substantially, to 3.5 percent in the latest report. But Root proclaimed that inflation “did not go down! They’re lying about it! … And they announced 303,000 new jobs. It’s a lie!” The host went on to recommend that Trump should announce on his first day that he will “deport 30 million illegals.”

If this is your news source, is it any wonder that you have no idea what’s going on? Trump, doing his best to keep up with the crazy, decreed that “any Jewish person that votes for Biden does not love Israel, and, frankly, uh, should be spoken to.” Trump went on to say that “thousands” of Hannibal Lecters — the psycho killer in “Silence of the Lambs” — have crossed the border illegally and are “now in our country.”

Needless to say, not a word was true. But much of it will be believed. Trump’s most faithful supporters will also undoubtedly believe what Trump said on Wednesday: that Biden proposes to “quadruple everyone’s taxes.” And they’ll accept that, as he posted Wednesday, it is a sign of “Communism at its worst” that he will next week “be <a href="https://www.mediaite.com/trump/trump-openly-complains-about-being-thrown-in-jail-in-unhinged-rant-against-court-cases/" target="_blank">forced to sit, GAGGED,</a> before a HIGHLY CONFLICTED &amp; CORRUPT JUDGE.”

Some of Trump’s erratic pronouncements are harmless, such as the one that he posted at 12:29 a.m. on Tuesday, apropos of nothing, containing just two words: “BIDEN TRIALS!!!” Or Wednesday morning’s <a href="https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/112247298597452366" target=_blank>unraveling missive</a> anointing Biden “the worst President in the history of the Untied [sic] States!”

But his unstable utterances can do real harm, too. This week, the House was struggling to come to agreement on extending a section of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, that allows the government to monitor foreign nationals living outside the United States. The authority was set to expire next week, and FBI chief Christopher Wray, appointed by Trump, said the <a href="https://apnews.com/article/fbi-surveillance-fisa-702-congress-reform-7dc1b506b58ce74de0d7983dfba98909" target=_blank>loss of the so-called Section 702 authority</a> would be “devastating” to national security.

Yet at 1:43 a.m. on Wednesday, hours before the House was to begin debate on extending the program, Trump killed the effort with an <a href="https://www.foxnews.com/video/6350691693112" target=_blank>all-caps post on Truth Social</a>: “KILL FISA, IT WAS ILLEGALLY USED AGAINST ME, AND MANY OTHERS. THEY SPIED ON MY CAMPAIGN!!!”

That was pure disinformation. The expiring section of FISA that lawmakers were racing to renew was entirely separate from the section of the law used to monitor a Trump campaign adviser in 2016.

But the truth didn’t matter. After Trump’s false, middle-of-the-night attack on the vital program, 19 House Republicans used a procedural vote to <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/04/10/fisa-house-republicans-mike-johnson-spying-section-702/" target="_blank">block the renewal from coming to the floor.</a> It was the seventh time this year that Republicans had defied their leaders by defeating the “rule” that allows debate to begin. In the two decades before this Republican majority took control of the House last year, it hadn’t happened a single time.

Leaving a House Republican Conference meeting after the FISA debacle, Rep. Max Miller (R-Ohio), a former Trump aide, told reporters the closed-door session was “pure chaos.”

Trump’s former attorney general Bill Barr said Republicans were “<a href="https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/4586620-bill-barr-blasts-trump-for-call-to-kill-fisa-crazy-and-reckless/" target=_blank>crazy and reckless</a>” for endangering “our principal tool protecting us from terrorist attacks.” The House passed the extension Friday on a second try after Trump relented.

Pure chaos. Crazy and reckless. These are the real-world consequences of Trump’s lies.

Tom Brenner

Anna Moneymaker

Of course, chaos has been on-brand for this MAGA-dominated House majority from the start. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) is threatening to oust Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) with a “motion to vacate,” just as other hard-liners booted Kevin McCarthy last year. She claims that Johnson is “<a href="https://x.com/reesejgorman/status/1777667465750757617" target=_blank>serving the Democrats</a> and the Biden administration.”

After impeaching Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas in February on dubious charges, House Republicans again delayed sending the articles to the Senate; they’re now hoping to do so next week. When then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) delayed sending Trump’s first impeachment to the Senate for 28 days, Johnson said the delay <a href="https://twitter.com/SpeakerJohnson/status/1210426145042247681" target=_blank>showed that the proceedings</a> had “no credibility” and were a “charade.” He has now held back Mayorkas’s supposedly urgent impeachment articles for 59 days.

In the meantime, Johnson is solidifying his MAGA bona fides by flying to Mar-a-Lago for a Friday event with Trump amplifying his lies about the 2020 election. Earlier this month, Johnson suggested that some of those who breached the Capitol during <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/interactive/2021/jan-6-insurrection-capitol/" target=_blank>the Jan. 6 insurrection</a> were “innocent, you know, people who were just there and <a href="https://x.com/atrupar/status/1774962599857176654" target=_blank>happened to be walking through the building</a>.”

Olivier Douliery

In small but measurable ways, Trump’s lies are catching up with him.

This week, the Trump Organization’s former CFO, Allen Weisselberg, began a five-month prison term for lying under oath. And Trump lost his latest effort to delay next week’s start of the Stormy Daniels hush-money trial.

Also this week, Trump Media stock continued its <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/04/05/trump-swindle-crowd-green-bay-rally/" target=_blank>downward spiral</a>. Those who bought in at the peak of the “AMAZING” (according to Trump) company’s initial public offering on March 25 had by Thursday lost almost 60 percent of their investment.

Then there was his <a href="https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4580775-read-trump-abortion-statement/" target=_blank>abortion statement </a>in which he expressed his belief that states would “do the right thing.” He also repeated the fiction that “Democrats are the radical ones” on abortion because they support infanticide — “execution after birth.”

But Arizona’s highest court disproved both claims the very next day, vividly showing the wild extremism Trump has unleashed in the states. The timing was so perfect that Fox News aired a new conspiracy theory: that the conservative jurists in Arizona for some reason timed their ruling to hurt Trump. “It absolutely seems scripted,” said <a href="https://www.nationalmemo.com/fox-buries-arizona-court-decision-ordering-near-total-abortion-ban" target="_blank">commentator Byron York</a>.

Trump, the day after the Arizona decision, defended his original abortion statement (“people are very happy”) by expounding on his even more preposterous claim that Democrats wanted Roe v. Wade overturned. “Every legal scholar, everybody from the Democrats and Republicans, they wanted to bring it back, for 53 years, bring it back to the states,” he said <a href="https://www.c-span.org/video/?534829-1/president-trump-remarks-atlanta" target=_blank>after arriving in Georgia</a> for a pair of fundraisers.

Hmm. That’s not how I remember it. But if Nelson Mandela says it, it must be true.

White House Correspondent Association's Beckman Award

National Press Club's Gingras Prize

Tears of a Clown: Glenn Beck and the Tea Bagging of America (Doubleday, 2010)

Homo Politicus (Doubleday, 2008)

Smashmouth (Basic Books, 2001)

The Destructionists: The Twenty-Five-Year Crack-Up of the Republican Party (Doubleday, 2022)

Yale University, BA cum laude in political science

Dana Milbank is an opinion columnist for The Washington Post. He sketches the foolish, the fallacious and the felonious in politics. His new book is “The Destructionists: The 25-Year Crackup of the Republican Party” (Doubleday). 

Dana Milbank

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