U.S. President Donald Trump speaks, as he makes an announcement on the economy, in the Oval Office at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., August 7, 2025. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst
A journalism professor has a dire warning for the American people — President Donald Trump may have literally lost touch with reality.
“The other day, President Donald Trump claimed he’d had a conversation with a former president who endorsed Trump’s ill-considered war against Iran,” wrote Professor John Krull, the director of Franklin College's Pulliam School of Journalism, for The Statehouse File. “According to Trump, the unnamed former president even said that he wished he had done what Trump had done.”
After arguing that the four ex-presidents are more believable when they deny the conversation than Trump is when insisting it actually happened, Krull pointed out that either explanation for Trump stating this untruth — either that he deliberately lied or that he sincerely believed what he said — is frightening.
“The least disturbing answer is that he just doesn’t care whether someone catches him fabricating falsehoods,” Krull explained. He reasons that his gullible, gullible followers will swallow any deception he conjures up, no matter how blatant it may be, and that’s all he cares about.”
As troubling as this explanation is, however, Krull said that the other option is even worse.
“That alternative is that the president of the United States—the person controlling the most powerful arsenal on earth—finally and fully has come to believe his own con and no longer is in firm contact with reality,” Krull said. He compared this Trump misstatement with one “on a larger scale,” namely his flip-flopping from saying he was anti-war during the 2024 presidential election to launching unprovoked wars against Venezuela and Iran. Per the latter, he cited the recent resignation letter of Joe Kent, Trump’s director of the National Counterterrorism Center.
“By highlighting Trump’s prior commitments to avoiding such wars, Kent makes clear that the president has broken faith with his most devoted supporters,” Krull wrote. “Kent’s implicit argument is that Trump plunged the United States into exactly the sort of war he promised he would keep the country out of.” Yet even when it comes to Iran, it is unclear to what extent Trump believes his own lies and to what extent he knows himself to be lying.
“The scariest thing about all this isn’t that Trump could be lying,” Krull wrote. “No, the scariest thing is that he might actually believe what he’s saying, whether it’s real or not. That’s terrifying.”
While some experts hope Trump’s flip-flopping on war and peace may hurt him with his base of supporters, others compare the MAGA movement to a cult — which means its members will for the most part stick with the leader no matter what.
"It is a cult,” former anti-transgender activist and Elon Musk lover Ashley St. Clair told The Bulwark on Tuesday. “And what you have to understand is that in any abusive relationship, your access to other people is cut off. You're isolated. Your access to information is cut off. Your access to people who might have rational perspectives on what you're involved in — that's cut off too.”
Former Illinois congressman Joe Walsh, a Republican who once supported Trump, expressed the same view.
“I thought you wanted him to end wars all over the world,” Walsh said. “You said you wanted him to end American entanglement in conflicts and wars around the world. America shouldn’t be involved in these wars, you said. That’s why you’re voting for Trump, you said.” Then, despite Trump’s actions against Denmark, Venezuela and Iran, they still support him.
He added, “And you don’t like when people call you a cult, Trump voters? What else are people to think when you voted for Trump to get us the hell out of wars around the world, and instead he gets us involved in wars around the world and starts new wars, and you still sing his praises and support him? What are we to think, MAGA, but that you are a cult?”