FOOLISH REALITY

This phenomenon is not new. Don Trump is a piker. Witness a list in S.I. Hayakawa, Language in Thought and Action, Chapter 2.  The author writes, 

Discrepancies between maps, and territories have been the subject matter

of comedy, satire, and general outbursts of moral judgment, throughout most human history….

Vilhjalmur Stefansson, The Standardization of Error (1927). How people

seem to prefer nonsense to fact – a witty and disturbing work.

Bergen Evans, The Natural History of Nonsense (1946). An amusing 

catalogue of errors, superstitions, and mistaken folk beliefs.

Martha Wolfenstein and Nathan Leites, Movies: A Psychological Study

(1950). A classic study of the ways in which movies create false maps

of reality in our heads.

Robert Lindner, The Fifty-Minute Hour (1955). Case studies of 

individuals with extremely distorted maps of reality. Many psychiatric

and psychological books in addition to those of Dr. Lindner provide 

examples of pathological fictious map-making.