To the editor:

Unlike the compulsive liar, who generally knows fact from fiction, the pathological liar lives with a false sense of reality. When confronted with evidence of a lie, the pathological liar will become aggressive, doubling down on the lie, never admitting an error. This perfectly describes Donald Trump.

Case in point: Trump recently told a story about riding in a helicopter with the former mayor of San Francisco, Willie Brown, and having to make a rough emergency landing. Trouble is Brown says he never rode in a helicopter with Trump. Rather than acknowledge a simple memory lapse, Trump became furious when confronted with the truth, claiming he could produce flight logs proving his story and hurling insults at anyone doubting him.

There’s little doubt Trump is a pathological liar, but it’s more complicated than that. We all know there’s a culture war in progress and features of that war include book banning and the re-writing of America’s racist past, including the ideas that the Civil War was not really about slavery and the institution wasn’t all that bad. Of course, there’s plenty of evidence refuting this revisionist version of our history, but there’s no one alive today who lived through those years; for us it’s the ambiguous distant past.

What is far more sinister is Trump, assisted by MAGA world, attempting to alter the reality of our recent past, insisting we didn’t see what we all did see. Trump says he won the 2020 election; he now says he never demanded Hillary Clinton be locked up; he says the attack on the Capital on Jan. 6th was not an insurrection; he claims the economy under his administration was the best in our history and insists his handling of the COVID pandemic was “perfect.” And MAGA world believes him.

A free, democratic society is based upon a set of accepted facts, about our history, about our values. If a huge chunk of our population believes in an alternative reality, we’re in heaps of trouble as a society.

Ray Clasen

North Fort Myers