In an October 11th post on Truth Social, Donald Trump wrote, in all caps of course, that “THE BIDEN FBI PLACED 274 AGENTS INTO THE CROWD ON JANUARY 6.”

“If this is so, which it is, a lot of very good people will be owed big apologies. What a SCAM – DO SOMETHING!!!”

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There’s only one problem: Joe Biden was not president on January 6, 2021, when the Capitol Insurrection took place. Donald Trump was.

In a piece for The Bulwark, columnist Andrew Egger emphasized why the nation cannot gloss over this massive blunder, describing it as “a keystone text of Trump’s second term.”

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“Start with the double standard here,” Egger wrote. “Imagine that last year, during the perennial (and understandable!) news cycles around Joe Biden’s age and fitness for office, Biden himself had claimed in passing to have been president during the January 6th attack.”

“It would have been a field day for the opposition and a multi-day story for the press. Reporters would have demanded answers for how the president could be laboring under such a delusion.”

Egger pointed out that Trump, too, is clearly less sharp than he used to be, but that “he has set the bar so low for his own conduct and speech that drilling into individual loony pronouncements like this starts to feel like an exercise in futility, a waste of everybody’s time.”

It’s possible he is lying on purpose for political gain, Egger said, or that he just doesn’t remember. But it’s too exhausting to care about every single one of his unhinged comments.

As Egger put it, “He is perversely helped by the fact that you can’t tell whether you should attribute a specific Trump claim to his melting brain or his melted soul.”

But the double standard, he added, is not as significant as the fact that the post shows exactly how Trump sees the world.

“Trump people and Biden people, heroes and villains, patriots and terrorists, angels and demons. All political actors are sorted into two great camps, and what matters aren’t any of the actual relevant facts about their behavior, or their motivations, or their leadership. All that matters is whether Trump perceives them as loyal allies or outside agitators.”

“He may have been president on January 6th. But an FBI that wasn’t jumping to do his will at that given moment was a Biden FBI, in his brain.”

The biggest issue, Egger said, is that he runs the entire government this way, eliminating any project or person he codes as against him and celebrating anyone who agrees with him.

And perhaps even more grave, his followers are still doing his bidding, despite his decisions being based on total nonsense.

“He’s clearly calling the shots,” Egger said. “The task for the rest of the apparatus of government is to get to work turning that lie or hallucination into reality. When he type-shouts ‘DO SOMETHING!!!’ there’s no question: They do.”

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