Trump: Liar, Lunatic, or Lord?

Trump’s insight into America’s vote count is rather remarkable

“If you count the legal votes, I easily win”

Trump’s outrage at the election is driven by a remarkable insight he has into the votes that have been cast.

Trump knows, for one, that if we count the legal votes, he wins. He also knows that millions of illegal votes have been cast. Furthermore, he knows that if we count those illegal votes, Biden will win.

And his supporters are understandably outraged by the injustice of it all.

I, for one, personally, don’t want to have a conversation about whether or not he’s right. I am not, in any way, challenging his facts.

I can’t.

Because I, personally, don’t know who will win if we count the legal votes. I don’t know how many illegal votes were cast. Furthermore, I don’t know who those illegal votes are actually cast for.

I, personally, don’t know who will win if we count the legal votes. For me, an unopened vote in an envelope is a complete mystery.

I, like most Americans, will have to wait until the votes have been counted to know who the votes are for. For me, an unopened vote in an envelope is a complete mystery. I have no idea who the vote inside is for.

I am curious though about precisely how Trump knows what’s inside the envelopes before they’re opened? And how can he tell illegal votes from legal ones? And how does he know who the illegal votes are for?

I am curious though about precisely how Trump knows what’s inside the envelopes before they’re opened?

C.S. Lewis, the author of the beloved Chronicles of Narnia, and a faithful Christian, proposed at litmus test for certain kinds of miraculous knowledge. It has been dubbed a trilemma, a portmanteau of tri (three) and dilemma.

Jesus of Nazareth, a Palestinian Jewish Rabbi, proposed that he was the “Son of God.” On one hand, as fantasy writer (with an entirely unhealthy interest in adults and children having sex in his novels) Piers Anthony has countered, this could mean that Jesus was a child of God, in the sense that we’re all children of God. But, people smarter than both Piers Anthony and I have realized that “Son of God,” in this case, means God embodied in human form on earth.

And claiming to be God on earth is a remarkable claim. Some people believed Jesus about this bit, and other’s did not. To this day disagreement about his claim remains. But C.S. Lewis summed up the difficulty nicely in his book Mere Christianity:

A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said [about being God] would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse.

And I find myself bringing this lens to the question of Trump’s insight into vote counts.

Trump knows what the total vote count is before the rest of us. And this seems to me to be a remarkable feat. Literally million of ballots across thousands of miles of country. The rest of us have to wait patiently while thousands and thousands of humans carefully count the votes to find out the totals. But for Trump, there seems to be a special connection between the vote count and his mind.

For Trump, there seems to be a special connection between the vote count and his mind.

I’d like to apply Lewis’ logic to Trump’s remarkable claim.

Perhaps Trump is a Liar

Perhaps Trump is just pretending to know what the vote count is to trick us. This is entirely possible. Sometimes politicians lie in order to get what they want. Maybe Trump simply made up the vote count.

Perhaps Trump is a Lunatic

This is also a real possibility. Humans have been known to get deeply disconnected from reality by a variety of mental illnesses. Perhaps Trump is hearing voices in his head that are telling him the vote count. And perhaps Trump believes those voices, even though they’re just the product of mental illness. This does happen to people.

Perhaps Trump is a sort of Lord

The third option is that President Trump does indeed have a fantastical, mystical, magical, or miraculous insight into what unopened ballots say inside, how many of them there are, and whether they were cast in a legal or illegal way.

I do worry about Trumps insight into the illegal ballots though. It might be seen as evidence of a crime if someone both knew how many illegal ballots there were and what the contents of them were. Because it may be hard to sell the Liberals on the good news that Trump has miraculous powers of insight into vote counts. And, apart from that, the only way one could know about those illegal ballots would be if one had cast them personally.

The only way one could know about those illegal ballots would be if one had cast them personally.

How about you, friend? What do you make of Trump’s insight into vote counts? Do you suspect him of being a liar, trying to trick Americans? Do you suspect him of being mentally ill, disconnected from our reality? Or do you find him a kind of Lord, with miraculous insight into our vote counts, perhaps knowledge flowing directly into his brain from God?