Donald Trump was in rare form after his New York rally yesterday, and we don’t mean that in a good way. It makes sense that he felt good after the rally — he had a relatively good crowd, with only three of four videos floating around of people leaving in the middle of his speech.

He even landed a decent joke about being “better than Elvis” at drawing crowds. That’s an impressive feat, considering if he made as much per day as Elvis did at his biggest concert (New Year’s Eve, 1975), his campaign would have $1.2 billion dollars to spend just from this year alone.

Anyway, you didn’t come here to do math. You can laugh at the Elvis bit anyway though, if you like:

Donald Trump: “I'm the greatest of all time. Maybe greater even than Elvis.”

Fact check: false. pic.twitter.com/akHMGX7f58

— Republicans against Trump (@RpsAgainstTrump) September 19, 2024

No, by “rare form,” I mean that he was particularly addled after the event. Not just “he thinks he’s bigger than Elvis” crazy, but “seeing people who aren’t there” crazy.

Trump made an appearance on Fox News’ Gutfeld! on Wednesday, and, just like it has every single day since September 10th, the topic of the debate came up. The man is still obsessed with people thinking he won a debate that literally everyone but Greg Gutfeld and Sean Hannity agrees he lost by a YUGE margin.

Margins like you’ve never seen before, even.

But this time around, he wasn’t content to just claim that he won the hearts and minds of the people discussing the debate afterwards. Instead, he included a debate “audience” that went “crazy” after every time the moderators were mean to him.

“But they didn’t correct her once, and they corrected me everything I said, practically — I think nine times, or eleven times — and the audience was absolutely, they went crazy. And … I walked off, I said, ‘That was a great debate. I loved it.’ You know, you got a lot of people watching, I guess we had 75 million people watching, something like that, and you have to do well. You can’t do badly.”

Trump on the debate: They didn’t correct her once and they corrected me, everything I said practically.. and the audience went absolutely crazy pic.twitter.com/H2SEsIDUg2

— Acyn (@Acyn) September 19, 2024

Let’s get a couple of things out of the way. Number one, he’s correct: The moderators did not fact-check Kamala Harris during the debate. Some post-debate fact-checkers had a few issues that came out afterwards, but in real time, the ABC moderators did not take issue with her.

However, Trump was fact-checked five times (not nine or eleven), and it was when he was saying blatantly, offensively false things. They fact-checked him on states executing babies after they’re born. They fact-checked him on the fully debunked, racist rumors that Haitian immigrants were eating people’s pets in Springfield, Ohio.

They fact-checked him on lies.

Number two, Trump keeps saying the things that he got fact-checked on in real time as though they’re true. Both Trump and Vance continue today to spread that garbage about Haitians.

But neither of those things is what has me worried. What worries me is the part where he said the audience went absolutely crazy. Dear Readers, let me say just four words:

There. Was. No. Audience.

There was no one in attendance at the debate. There was him and Kamala and the moderators and whatever technicians and camera operators were necessary to make the debate function, and that’s it.

Donald Trump carries a screaming, supportive crowd around in his head. That’s the only explanation. He literally is that kid who used to shoot hoops in the back yard and when he made a basket, would cup his hands around his mouth and do that whisper-scream thing mimicking crazed fans, only he never stopped doing it.

And before we get into what he said at the end of this clip about how many people were watching at home, let me say that it doesn’t matter. His defenders will say that’s who he was talking about in the interview, were the 75 million people watching on TV, and to them I say, “How did he know they went crazy?”

Because Trump is CLEARLY discussing what was happening at the time, DURING the debate, that HE WAS PRESENT FOR, and therefore not in anyone’s living room listening to them scream.

There is no way for him to be referencing the people at home, because even he is smart enough to understand that you can’t claim that people you can’t see are doing something you can’t hear.

He can only have been talking about a debate audience.

The only question that remains here is whether he’s mistaking the debate for some other time when there was an audience that supported him, or whether he thinks there were actually other people at the debate.

Either option is pretty chilling to me.