Inside Donald Trump’s imaginary and frightening world

• Donald Trump paints a dystopian picture of America under Biden, with claims of rampant crime and the approach of “World War III”.
• Trump’s claims, including immigrants eating pets and gender-confirming surgeries in schools, lack evidence and are often exaggerated.
• Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg notes Trump is increasingly detached from reality, focusing on his “imaginary world”.

Ashley Parker is a senior national political correspondent for the Washington Post. She has been part of three Post teams that won Pulitzer Prizes - two for national reporting (in 2018 and 2024) and one for public service (in 2022). She joined the Post in 2017, after 11 years at the New York Times. She is also an on-air contributor to NBC News/MSNBC.

OPINION

In Donald Trump’s imaginary world, Americans can’t venture out to buy a loaf of bread without getting shot, mugged or raped. Immigrants in a small Ohio town eat their neighbours’ cats and dogs. World War III and economic collapse are just around the corner. And kids head off to school only to return at day’s end having undergone gender-confirming surgery.

The former president’s imaginary world is a dark, dystopian place, described by Trump in his rallies, interviews, social media posts and debate appearances to paint an alarming picture of America under the Biden-Harris administration.

It is a distorted, warped and, at times, absurdist portrait of a nation where the insurrectionists who stormed the US Capitol on January 6, 2021 to deadly effect were merely peaceful protesters, and where unlucky boaters are faced with the unappealing choice between electrocution or a shark attack. His extreme caricatures also serve as another way for Trump to traffic in lies and misinformation, using an alternate reality of his own making to create an often terrifying - and, he seems to hope - politically devastating landscape for his political opponents.

Trump, for instance, regularly claims Democrats favour abortions up until the day of birth - and, in some cases, even after birth.

Speaking at the September 10 presidential debate with US Vice-President Kamala Harris in Philadelphia, Trump falsely claimed Harris’ running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, has said “abortion in the ninth month is absolutely fine”.

“He also says, ‘execution after birth’ - execution, no longer abortion because the baby is born - is okay,” Trump continued.

In fact, Walz has not said this, the Washington Post Fact Checker found, and “execution after birth” - or infanticide - is illegal in all states. According to the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, in 2021, nearly all abortions - 93.5% - occur at or before 13 weeks, and fewer than 1% were performed after 21 weeks.

Trump supporters, shown here during a rally in Glendale, Arizona on August 23, tend to either believe Trump's rhetoric or argue he's merely exaggerating for effect. Photo / Tom Brenner, The Washington Post

World War III, too, is another all-but-certainty should Trump not be elected in November, the former president frequently claims. In July, before a meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at his private Mar-a-Lago Club, Trump told reporters only his electoral victory could stave off another global conflagration.

“If we win, it’ll be very simple. It’s all going to work out and very quickly,” Trump said. “If we don’t, you’re going to end up with major wars in the Middle East and maybe a third World War. You are closer to a third World War right now than at any time since the second World War. You’ve never been so close, because we have incompetent people running our country.”

And this month, shortly after news former Republican vice-president Dick Cheney and his daughter, Liz Cheney, a former Republican congresswoman from Wyoming, planned to vote for Harris, Trump took to his Truth Social site to attack them. “I am the Peace President, and only I will stop World War III! [sic]” he claimed.

“He’s not the same candidate he was in 2016 or 2020,” said Simon Rosenberg, a Democratic strategist who took note of Trump’s “imaginary world” in a post on social media platform X (formerly Twitter) this month. “He’s far more diminished and untethered.”

“The percentage of time he’s spending in the real world versus his dystopian world is decreasing. He’s just not speaking about things that are true in this world that we all live in,” Rosenberg said.

“It is true that economic hardships, border tragedies, and two new wars have broken out under Vice-President Kamala Harris and four more years of her policies will only make the pain and suffering worse,” said Karoline Leavitt, the Trump campaign’s national press secretary, in a statement. “President Trump speaks the hard truth about this reality and has an optimistic vision for the future to make America strong, safe and prosperous again by securing the border, cutting taxes, bringing down inflation, and restoring peace around the world, like there was during his first term.”

Asked to provide specific examples of all of the claims Trump has alleged, Leavitt sent over a list that in some cases - like schools performing sex reassignment surgery - did not provide any evidence of the assertions. In other cases, such as not being able to buy groceries without getting accosted, Leavitt offered several examples of such crimes, but not the mass phenomena justifying Trump’s claim “you can’t walk across the street to get a loaf of bread; you get shot, you get mugged, you get raped”.

Among Trump’s supporters, some seem to accept his false claims as unassailable truths, while others say he sometimes exaggerates - but in doing so accurately captures their fears about real issues facing the nation.

“I don’t think he does stretch the truth,” said Trump supporter Marelee Ernestberg, 59, as she defended some of his more extreme falsehoods, including his baseless claim about Haitian migrants eating pets, which she called “an absolute truth” that did not surprise her. “Trump is not a liar.”

Speaking at her first Trump rally in Las Vegas earlier this month, Ernestberg pivoted when discussing Trump’s claim children are being given gender-confirming surgeries in school - and said that she does not care about the list of falsehoods.

“Now, of course, everybody exaggerates … Trump’s not perfect, and when I’m looking at a candidate, I’m not looking for perfection. I’m not going to marry the guy,” she said. “I’m not looking for a spouse. I’m looking for someone who’s going to bring this country to a safer, more secure place.”

Immigration is another topic ripe for Trump’s land of make-believe. For example, the former president repeatedly references Hannibal Lecter, the fictional serial killer from The Silence of the Lambs, as a way of conflating migrants seeking asylum with people in mental institutions to suggest without evidence - but with dehumanising language - that those crossing the US-Mexico border are migrants from insane asylums.

“We have people that are being released into our country that we don’t want in our country,” Trump told a Wildwood, New Jersey crowd in May after mentioning “the late, great Hannibal Lecter”.

Trump also regularly claims the US government is putting up undocumented immigrants in “luxury hotels”. In Manhattan, for instance, the city has spent millions converting motels, office buildings and even some up-scale hotels into housing for thousands of migrants, but the accommodations are shelter operations, not five-star opulence.

“You have soldiers right now laying on the streets of different cities, all Democrat-run. They’re laying on the streets in front of hotels, in some cases luxury hotels, and you have illegal immigrants coming in and living in those hotels and laughing at our soldiers as they walk by into a luxury lobby,” Trump said during an economic speech in New York this month. “Is there something wrong with that thinking? Is there something wrong with our country?”

And recently Trump has also begun falsely claiming a Venezuelan gang has overtaken an apartment complex in Aurora, Colorado, prompting the local police department to release a video statement explaining after talking to the residents, they are seeing a “different picture”. Yes, the police chief continued, some gang members do live in the Aurora community, but “gang members have not taken over this complex”.

Trump, however, was undaunted.

“You saw in Aurora, Colorado a group of very tough young thugs from Venezuela taking over big areas, including buildings,” Trump told a podcast, despite the police statement to the contrary. “They’re taking over buildings. They have their big rifles. But they’re taking over buildings. We’re not going to let this happen.”

At the presidential debate, an agitated Trump repeated the baseless claim that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio are eating the town’s pets.

“In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs,” Trump said. “The people that came in, they’re eating the cats. They’re eating - they’re eating the pets of the people that live there.”

It is also a continuation of Trump’s perpetual lying and obfuscating; in Trump’s presidency alone, an analysis by the Post’s Fact Checker found that he made more than 30,000 false or misleading claims – an average of about 21 untruths per day.

Another favourite claim Trump offers is that tourists come to the nation’s capital hoping to see the sights - and end up travelling home in body bags. Accepting his party’s nomination in Milwaukee in July, Trump lambasted the nation’s capital, calling it “a horrible killing field”.

Crime in DC did increase between 2022 and 2023, when all crime went up 26% - and violent crime increased by 39%, according to the DC police. But so far this year, both crimes are down from the 2023 numbers.

Recently, there have been several high-profile instances of out-of-towners being killed while in DC - including a woman visiting the city for a concert and a teacher visiting for a conference - but Trump’s rhetoric is deeply overstated.

“They leave from Wisconsin, they go to look at the Washington Monument, they end up getting stabbed, killed or shot,” Trump said in Milwaukee.

The former president has also seized on gender-confirming surgery as another area in which to embellish.

“Can you imagine you’re a parent and your son leaves the house and you say, ‘Jimmy, I love you so much. Go have a good day in school’, and your son comes back with a brutal operation,” Trump said at a rally in Wisconsin this month.

Then, speaking in Arizona last Thursday, Trump spun a similar fictional tale.

“Can you imagine?” the former president asked. “Your child goes to school and they don’t even call you, and they change the sex of your child.”

Many of Trump’s imaginary scenarios go unchecked in real-time, in part because he delivers them to adoring crowds or favourable news outlets. But at this month’s debate, the moderators were primed for his fictitious world.

After Trump made his claim about immigrants eating cats and dogs, ABC News’s David Muir interjected: “You bring up Springfield, Ohio, and ABC News did reach out to the city manager there. He told us there have been no credible reports of specific claims of pets being harmed, injured or abused by individuals within the immigrant community.”

But Trump persisted.

“The people on television say my dog was taken and used for food!” Trump insisted, turning to the often make-believe world of television to buttress his own imagined fantasy.