Last week, the world — including the Trump part of it — got a bit of a surprise: Apparently the former president secretly invited a documentary crew to film him as he was doing bad things. Somehow few in his sphere even knew about it…and all of a sudden it was heading for the House select committee investigating Jan. 6. (Ditto the nation’s televisions.) Only the few that have seen it know the horrors it contains, but here’s a teensy spoiler: It probably makes Trump seem nuts.
In a new interview with The Intelligencer, the film’s director, Alex Holder, does his best to tiptoe around spoilers, but he does offer his two cents on the ex-president’s curious brain. When asked if he thought Trump really believed his own voter fraud nonsense, Holder had an interesting response:
Based on my interactions with him — I don’t claim to be a psychologist or psychiatrist, but in those moments, the position he gave to me is someone who was utterly irrational, someone living in an alternate reality, and that there was no way to have a coherent, rational conversation with him. It’s very scary when people start to believe in their own lies, and when you can’t have a rational conversation with them — that’s when things become very dangerous. And we’ve seen that play out in history, when very dangerous people start to believe in their own rhetoric and are able to get their supporters to believe.
Of course, even that may not explain why Trump would let a film crew record movements during a sensitive time. Holder explained that part of the reason the Trumps wanted to be film was because they’d “been complaining for a very long time that they weren’t given a fair shot by the media, the media were biased, et cetera. So my approach was to say ‘I’m here to listen to you.’”
In the meantime, citizens will have to subsist on the Jan. 6 hearings, which have been explosive enough to elicit some interesting responses.
(Via The Intelligencer)