Can Donald Trump Handle the Truth?

Debating crowd sizes may seem inconsequential and petty, and it is. But Mr. Trump was the one who had been unable to let go of the issue during his first week in office: On Thursday, The Washington Post reported that on the morning after he was sworn in, the president himself pressured the director of the National Park Service to locate more photos of the crowd in hopes of disproving news media accounts of its size. With behavior like this, Mr. Trump has reminded the nation of an essential truth about his personality: He sees what he wants to see, and nothing else.

.. Any information that challenges his worldview does not lead him to reconsider his beliefs; it “gets flushed down the sort of emotional and intellectual dispose-all that I think he carries around with him,” Timothy O’Brien, one of Mr. Trump’s biographers, told Politico recently.

.. We have had incurious presidents before, and they also displayed tremendous self-certainty. Yet even The Decider himself, George W. Bush, proved willing to rethink his views as contrary facts came to light — like the failure of Iraqis to garland American occupiers with flowers. Mr. Trump is not merely uninterested in facts; he repels them. In their place, he confects his own reality to feed his bottomless emotional and psychological needs. It is not America First, it is Donald Trump First, and always.

.. Consider his response to ABC’s David Muir, who challenged him to back up his repeated, and repeatedly debunked, claim that millions of people voted illegally — which he insists is the reason he lost the popular vote by nearly three million votes. Rather than admitting he had no evidence, Mr. Trump said: “You know what’s important? Millions of people agree with me when I say that.” In other words, facts aren’t important; blind trust in a leader is.

.. This is the essence of Mr. Trump: selling himself or his plans by massaging and embellishing facts, or simply making them up and hoping everyone plays along. It is a strategy he developed, quite purposefully, during his days as a brash New York City real estate tycoon, and later relied on as a TV personality. He even has his own term for it: “truthful hyperbole,” which Mr. Trump described in his 1987 book, “The Art of the Deal,” as “an innocent form of exaggeration — and a very effective form of promotion.”

The tactic worked back when he was cajoling banks into giving him giant loans for casinos that would later collapse in bankruptcy, or trying to convince people that his 58-story skyscraper was actually 68 stories, or claiming that his reality show, “The Apprentice,” was the “No. 1 show on television,” when it was in fact 67th.

.. “there’s no check on his power except reality.” The nation, and the world, are about to find out if that’s right.