You can't believe or trust a word Trump says.

Or make any sense of what he says.

The Washington Post fact checkers have documented more than 20,000 lies Trump has uttered in his capacity as president so far.  But lying is not the only perversion he imposes on language.  He calls people names like a resentful juvenile. And he uses language to produce clutter, to create a mess so chaotic that people get disoriented.

I use the term clutter  from the military.  As an air defense guided missile crewman years ago, clutter was the term used to describe a situation that made the radar useless.  Sometimes there would be conditions in the environment that would shatter the radar beams so that when they were reflected back they were fragmented and garbled.  When we set up missile bases, one of the first tasks was to make a clutter map so that we could work around things that affected the radar signals.  Weather can also create clutter, as some clouds and air currents can distort radar beams.  We also had to prepare to deal with the evasion tactics that might be used by enemy aircraft to keep the radar from tracking them.  One such tactic was for an aircraft which was being tracked by radar to release a cargo hold of disposable aluminum pie plates in the air around it which would send  the computer that controlled the radar into a total breakdown.  The computer could not deal with clutter.  However, we had a couple of radar operators who could switch the radar to manual control and discern the real target--usually.  

When Trump speaks or tweets, the effect is like unleashing a blizzard of pie tins into the air so that target facts get lost in the verbal clutter.  Trump destroys language as a primary communicative device. He uses a ploy historically  used by totalitarian regimes to keep the public from knowing what is actually  going on in the world.  In Trump's case we do not know for sure whether his clutter is calculated or the product of his disordered mind.  Whatever the case, it makes his removal from office an intellectual and moral imperative.

A few members of the press have challenged some of his lies at press conferences.  His response is to call a sudden end to the press conference,

Until he is gone, Americans  might take a tip from how many foreign leaders have come to deal with Trump.  As the Washington Post reports, world leaders now tend to shrug their shoulders and ignore him.  They treat Trump as if he is a patient in a mental ward.  The problem is that they are coming to view the United States as the mental ward and are avoiding having much to do with it.

If America is to regain status and respect among other nations again, it will have to prove that it has not become a loony bin.  Until the White House can be reclaimed and restored, it will have to be regarded in isolation from the rest of the country as a place where mental and moral defectives are housed to keep them from harming the general population.

The problem is that Trump has a large cadre of followers and enablers that are attracted to the insanity.  The mental deterioration within the nation is something that has not been clearly defined and confronted.  It may not be something that the 2020 election can resolve.