Amateur vs. Professional Liars: President Trump is amateur. Novelists are professionals. There is that difference, but what might they share psychologically?

President Trump, who, according to The New York Times and The Washington Post, is a notorious liar (1, 2), does not admit lying, and is condemned for doing it.

Novelists make a joke of being professional liars. Of course, since they label their lies “fiction,” their lies are not, technically, lies. And novelists are not only not condemned for their fictions, but are paid and awarded prizes.

It appears that both Trump and novelists, at least at the time they tell them, believe in many of their lies and fictions.

At the time Trump tells most of his lies, he apparently, in some sense, believes in their reality. After all, they are usually checkable, and he knows a president’s facts will be checked. 

Similarly, at the time novelists write their fictions, they often feel, in Toni Morrison’s phrase, that their fictions are “more real than real.”

Both Trump’s lies and novelists’ fictions are “alternative facts” (3)—the alternative facts of alternate realities—the alternate realities of alternate personalities.

1. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/06/23/opinion/trumps-lies.html

2. https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/politics/trump-claims-database/?utm_term=.aee84a3dcd2d

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_facts