The weirdest lie that Donald Trump tells is also the lie that he tells most persistently.

Not the lie that he’s a capable and self-made and wildly successful businessman. Not the lie that he’s worth $10 billion--though a lot of that number has to do with how he’s feeling about himself, apparently. Not the lie that he is “very well liked.” Not any of the unnecessary, cascading lies that he seemingly can’t help but tell and re-tell, like some sort of reflexive defense mechanism against even uncomplicated facts. The weird lie is not any of the rest of the easily dismissed falsehoods that fall readily from his mouth whenever he opens it, seemingly under force of gravity. He is a precocious 5-year-old lost in his own imagination, telling tall tales about what happened on the playground this morning, sourced from the muddled and mixed-up and indistinguishable fantasies of recent dreams, TV programs, and embellished memories.

Trump does this on purpose. It’s the plan--to play to people’s fantasies, to exhibit otherworldly bravado and speak in hyperbolic terms because it gets people really quite excited. Excited to cheer him on worshipfully, excited to tear him down hatefully--it doesn’t matter, so long as it changes the temperature in the room, as that’s the only goal.

The weirdest lie that Donald Trump tells is that he is a Great Teller of Truths--and he says it all the time, as it is the basic underpinning of his entire campaign. The animating principle of The Trumppening is that he is the only one willing to tell the truth in a barren mediascape of crooked, lying politicians and their journalist pals, the complicit, always spinning and distorting, evil media. He needs this lie, that he’s simply telling the truth, to justify the absurd lies he continues to pile on top, the vast gilded skyscraper he’s built to the heavens, garish and imposing and full of promise, but entirely unoccupied, floor after floor of exposed rebar and unfinished concrete sitting empty within. But that doesn’t make it any less weird, to hear him insisting against all evidence that he is simply telling the truth, a contradiction born of his belief that “the truth” is, by definition, whatever happens to be on his mind at any given moment. It takes a special kind of self-centered asshole to say that “the truth” is reflected in his momentary state of mind, but Donald Trump is nothing if not a special kind of self-centered asshole. Thoughtfulness and consideration are tossed aside as the refuge of liars, with only instinct and thoughtless reaction valued for their unmassaged “honesty.”

But what makes it especially weird is the seeming contradiction that even in the self-induced forced word-belchings of unvarnished “truth” that come pouring forth whenever he is in front of a microphone, he is often speaking around whatever it is he is really trying to say, allowing his audience to fill in the final (usually terrible or absurd) blank for themselves. How is this anything but the same cutesy political bullshit we’ve come to expect from the same politicians he and his supporters rage against, but dialed back to the intellectual rigor of a third-grader? Trump isn’t some bold teller of great truths--he walks right up to the unspeakably dumb thing and then doesn’t say it, and scoffs at you later for appropriately finishing his sentence. Trump is a bleeped expletive, spelled f**k on the page for all the delicate sensibilities in the audience, then ostentatiously, performatively offended when you read his unedited words aloud back to him. For a man who claims to be offended by political correctness, he is stridently politically correct, usually leaving out the wherever or the whatever or the whoever, letting what’s left just unsaid fester in the angry and aggrieved boils of his audience. He has taken the admonition of “protesting too much” as a schoolyard challenge, assigning his own worst tendencies and insecurities to the enemy, whoever it might be for the moment. Crooked Hillary says I don’t have the temperament to be Commander in Chief, he’ll say, well let me tell you, Hillary Clinton is the one that doesn’t have the temperament, he’ll roar, flushed.

It’s a weird lie, that Trump tells the truth, because he doesn’t even pretend to adhere to it, just treats it like a self-reinforcing identity--that he tells the truth because he is a person that just tells the truth, so what he says must be true. Except when it isn’t, when he’s obviously joking, when you just took him too seriously, when you didn’t catch the obvious sarcasm. He didn’t mean that Megyn Kelly was bleeding from her wherever, but just her nose. Honest. He wasn’t really stroking the infantile insurrectionist fantasies of over-armed man-babies, he just thinks they’re an impassioned bunch that should use their guns to exercise their First Amendment rights, nothing more. Honest. He doesn’t really think Barack Hussein Obama founded ISIS, you idiot, even when he says that’s precisely what he means, over and over again, after being given the opportunity to walk it back, over and over again. Honest.

Well, until he does walk it back, because he was obviously joking. Honest.