Batkid

Pareene:

Lying for the president’s sake also requires lying to everyone else in the nation. It is easy, especially for political journalists, to become inured to the way in which certain government officials treat their jobs as analogous to those of the cast and crew of The Truman Show, and to forget that the United States is more than just a collection of people in government. It is an actual country with people in it. Many of those people cannot discern that all of this talk of illegal votes and Trump’s paths to victory is merely being done to help Trump come to terms with his loss.

Which makes Donald Trump a bit like Batkid, the young cancer patient on whose behalf the city San Francisco and the Make-a-Wish Foundation once staged a full day of make-believe superheroism—if roughly 40 percent of the residents of San Francisco genuinely believed the charade was real, believed Batkid was their only chance to stop the forces of evil descending on their city, and couldn’t understand why the media kept claiming The Riddler had fairly defeated him and would soon be in charge.