THE ORANGE CORY BOOKER:

What I know for certain is that here on the physical plane of existence there is no security emergency at the U.S.-Mexico border. The incursion the president describes is not the lived reality of any actual Americans. Border crossings are down, crime is down, employment is up. Yet the president's hallucinations persist, and in the past week they seem to be growing more severe.

At a speech in El Paso, rather than just talking about the imaginary caravan of people invading the country, Trump actually claimed that he had invented the word "caravan" altogether. (In fact, the word is sourced from medieval Latin, caravana, picked up during the Crusades from Persian karwan "group of desert travelers." Donald Trump is very old but this is slightly before his time.)

He has also begun touting the construction of an imaginary wall. "The wall is being built. It'll continue. It's going at a rapid pace," he said. "Now you really mean 'finish the wall' because we've built a lot of it," he continued. None of these statements are remotely true. And rather than be alarmed that the president is having a wall-themed seance, everyone is going along with it. After all, the wall is in our hearts.

So then I start to wonder--maybe I'm the crazy one. Maybe this is all just equal parts Trumpian hyperbole and good old fashioned gaslighting.

But if so, what explains the other delusions, like the blubbering tough guys crying whenever they meet Trump. And it's not just this one time. Trump seems to keep meeting "monster" sized buff men who are brought to tears by their gratitude to him. For a wall that doesn't exist. That's designed to stop an infiltration that isn't happening.

The layers of unreality build upon itself.

After-all, whatever happened to the president's friend "Jim" who used to go to Paris every year but now doesn't? He was scared of the imaginary brown-skinned "infiltration" of the City of Lights. We haven't heard from him in a while. Are you in there Jim?

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