Confabulation, Inc.

Trump reenacts 9/11, Paxton reenacts the Bible, and the GOP reenacts a party while the actual records sit untouched next to all of it

Good morning! Dishonesty that doesn’t bother with plausibility is trying to occupy the space where a real memory should be. Today we have a president who can’t leave September 11th alone, a Senate candidate who’d rather relitigate pronouns than a child abuse case with his name on it, and a party staging a convention around a man voters are trying to get away from. Different rooms, same move: put the performance where the record should be, and hope nobody checks the receipts.

At the Tunnel to Towers commemoration on the Ellipse, Trump told a version of his 9/11 story that’s gotten more cinematic with each retelling, the way a fish story grows a few inches every year at the bar. Two firefighters, he said, physically lifted him, “big, strong guys,” he clarified, lest anyone picture a couple of ninety-pound weaklings hauling America’s most self-described “big” man to safety and ran him from a building they feared was about to collapse. No firefighter has been publicly identified who corroborates the story, and no independent evidence has emerged to substantiate it. The photograph most often cited as evidence is dated a week after the attacks, taken blocks away; evidence, if anything, of his enduring talent for showing up exactly where the cameras already are. On the actual day, by his own decades-old account, he was at Trump Tower, four miles off, doing a radio call-in where his first reflection on the collapse of the World Trade Center was, memorably, that his own building was now the tallest one downtown. Grief, but make it real estate.

Set the truth of it aside for a second, because there’s a simpler problem underneath: a commemoration for the dead is not supposed to be about the living person telling it. Twenty-five years on, the appropriate move at a memorial is silence, or at most someone else’s name in your mouth. He couldn’t manage either.

When New York Magazine and Maggie Haberman pushed on this, Trump didn’t so much clarify as double down with interest: a demand for her retraction, a claim that his former head of security has “confirmed” the site visit to unnamed journalists (who remain, characteristically, unnamed), and the flatly false assertion that no one is permitted to speak at the New York memorial, which he says is why he skipped it for the Pentagon instead, a claim that requires believing the rule exists only when it’s convenient. Commentators on both sides of the Atlantic converged on the same discomfort, independent of each other, which is its own kind of fact-check: a British broadcaster called it a lie about “the single greatest peacetime atrocity visited upon American soil,” while an American panel called inserting himself into the story of people who died and fled for their lives “demeaning” to the people who actually lived it. Both also noted, unprompted, that more people have since died of 9/11 related illnesses post-Ground-Zero than died that morning; a real cost sitting quietly underneath the fabricated one, waiting for anyone to notice it’s actually the story.

Texas is running the same trick, just with worse production values. Paxton’s newest ad puts an AI-generated Talarico in a fake “King James Talarico Bible,” reciting stripped-of-context lines about gender and faith to paint him as an enemy of Christianity, a whole 30 seconds of crayon-scrawled scripture, because nothing says “defender of the faith” like commissioning a deepfake of your opponent doing Bible fanfic. It’s paid for by the campaign directly, not MAGA Inc., whose recent $10 million buy for the race legally can’t coordinate with a candidate. What the ad is very studiously not about: Paxton’s office cut a plea deal for Adam Hoffman, a Waco attorney accused of repeatedly raping a child, reducing felony charges to misdemeanors after a mistrial, a deal so lenient Hoffman never had to register as a sex offender, and lenient enough that Paxton’s own primary opponent ran ads over it before Paxton even got to the general election. Funny how a man this invested in Talarico’s theology has so little to say about his own record on protecting kids. Talarico, for his part, is the one now demanding the files be released. This week, in the very city hosting the culture-war ad campaign, he’s scheduled to speak from a reading room built around 3.5 million printed pages of the Epstein files, while Attorney General Todd Blanche, who’s been busy helping keep those files closed, is set to speak at the convention next door. You couldn’t script the irony any better, though to be fair, someone did just script an AI Bible.

Which brings us to the convention itself, the mothership of the bit. Republicans are betting their midterm message on a president whose approval sits around 38%, centering him so completely that internal messaging reportedly dropped the word “Republican” altogether in favor of “Trump’s midterm convention” subtlety being for other parties. It hasn’t landed the way they’d hoped. Axios put expected attendance at only around 100 lawmakers and candidates, several vulnerable Republicans facing tight races are staying away entirely, mindful that “seen with Trump” is not the endorsement it used to be, and a ticket process billed as a competitive lottery was, by last week, approving applications instantly; turns out the exclusive club had folding chairs to spare. Control of Congress will be decided in less than two months, and the party’s answer to that pressure is to make its biggest national event of the cycle even more explicitly about Trump, even as some candidates in competitive races are choosing not to attend. Bold.

A widening war keeps intruding on the spectacle. The US destroyed five more Iranian tankers this week; Iran answered by firing on US forces in Jordan, a new address for this particular fight. Both governments are still, technically, one expired memorandum away from a table that Qatar and China are pushing renewed negotiations; Russia and Saudi Arabia have called for a return to the expired memorandum; Japan has urged continued diplomatic consultation.; an unusual moment of the whole world agreeing on something, and that something being “please, anything but this.” None of it is separate from the domestic story. A war that won’t resolve, an economy voters keep naming as their top concern, and a party choosing to spend its biggest moment of the cycle relitigating whether its own leader was carried out of a burning building twenty-five years ago, priorities apparently being optional.

Where the agency is: none of this required forensic work to catch. The receipts are sitting in plain sight, scattered through dated photographs, court records and the convention’s own ticketing system, while an increasingly elaborate performance tries to persuade us not to look at them. That may be sloppy, arrogant or simply the confidence of people accustomed to having their version repeated before anyone checks it. The antidote is to put the performance beside the record and let the gap do the talking.

Thank you to everyone who sent birthday wishes yesterday! I was genuinely humbled by the hundreds of kind messages, and I’m more grateful than I can say.

Lest all that affection go to my head, the universe thoughtfully brought me back down to earth by delivering, via actual snail mail and on my birthday, solicitations for hearing aids and senior living facilities.

The graying hair has landed me firmly on somebody’s list.

Marz, however, remains unconvinced that I’m ready to be put out to pasture. As long as I can keep up with him, or at least make a respectable attempt, I’m going with his assessment.

Thank you all. Truly. You made my day very special.