Poor working white Americans are willful illusionists. So is Trump. This explains why lying isn’t a problem for them.

Trump has made compensatory wishful thinking, a staple of redneck resentment culture, professional. Rednecks like him because he’s stupid and racist and loves to increase the suffering of “others.”

If you’re poor and you want to be happy, you either organize with other socialists or you compensate (aka distract) with some fantasy, drug, TV show, lynching, or dose of Fox News Schadenfreude. Marx called these pain-soothing escapisms opium. It is a method quelling pain by invoking weakness. It is intentional helplessness, coupled with a revenge fantasy.

Trump, one of the stupidest and most unethical people on the planet, became president. He does not believe in God, but he does believe that God favors him.

When asked at a party, he said: “There is no God, and Trump is his favored son.”

When Trump does not like reality, he invents a fantasy and then tries to substantiate it through agreement. That is, he tries to make faux reality into full reality by means of social reality. Why? Because … sometimes what a thing is really is determined by consensus. For example, which of “You’re a winner” and “You’re a loser” is true is determined by polling. But reality itself is not determined by polling. Except for psychosomatic disease, self-concept, self-esteem, and the denizens of a common fantasy.

Anyway, Trump has made the wishful thinking of the stunted fantasist cool and professional. Rednecks have already been doing this for decades. So lying doesn’t upset Trump’s base. It makes them like him more.