Even Donald Trump's most presidential speech was a bizarre, lie-riddled fantasy

On Wednesday, Donald Trump gave one of the most presidential speeches he's ever delivered — which is to say, a speech that was written out beforehand and which he read off a teleprompter, without his usual digressions into his spectacular performance in the polls and the scum-sucking lowlifes who have filed lawsuits against him (or are judges in those lawsuits). But just when you think Trump is going to put together a logical and persuasive case on something — in this speech, the all-encompassing villainy of Hillary Clinton was the topic — he dashes off into the land of his imagination, spinning out a weird series of easily debunked lies and bizarre fantasies.

This pattern repeated itself over and over in Trump's speech (you can read the prepared text here; there were some off-the-cuff embellishments, but not too many). He would start with a reasonable critique: for instance, that Clinton supported NAFTA, which cost Americans jobs. But then he would take that critique to an absurd place: "Hillary Clinton gave China millions of our best jobs, and effectively let China completely rebuild itself. In return, Hillary Clinton got rich!"

After trade, Trump moved on to Benghazi, of course. Setting a serious tone, Trump said, "She started the war that put [Ambassador Chris Stevens] in Libya, denied him the security he asked for, then left him there to die." Trump continued with this fanciful exploration of the full breadth and depth of Clinton's power, which apparently existed on a scale that would make kings and presidents seem like tiny bugs the titanic Hillary could brush off her shoulder:

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Let's recap. You may have thought there was a revolution in Libya to overthrow longtime despot Moammar Gadhafi, a revolution that accomplished its initial goal with some help from the United States. This apparently is not correct; it turns out that what actually happened was that Hillary Clinton invaded Libya. Iran's influence in the region? All because Hillary Clinton wanted it that way. Syria's civil war? Started by Hillary Clinton. All those people you saw protesting Hosni Mubarak's regime in Cairo's Tahrir Square? Sent there by Hillary Clinton, I suppose, who then engineered the ensuing election to make sure the Muslim Brotherhood won. Radical Islam? Non-existent before Hillary Clinton came along (but don't tell al Qaeda).

I won't bother to go through the long list of lies Trump told through the rest of his speech (that he opposed the Iraq War from the beginning, that there's no system to vet refugees, etc.) But whenever Trump began a legitimate critique of Clinton, it would inevitably go off the rails. It's fine to criticize her use of private email at the State Department, which was a mistake. But Trump says that in the personal emails her attorneys segregated from those to be sent to the State Department and which were then deleted, there were terrifying secrets. "While we may not know what is in those deleted emails, our enemies probably do. So they probably now have a blackmail file over someone who wants to be president of the United States. This fact alone disqualifies her from the presidency. We can't hand over our government to someone whose deepest, darkest secrets may be in the hands of our enemies."

I suppose if you use "probably" as a modifier you can say whatever you want, like "Donald Trump probably keeps his hair soft and manageable by shampooing in the blood of kittens." Do we know that, or have any concrete evidence that it might be true? No. But it probably is, right?

I have no doubt that Trump's most ardent fans eat stuff like this up. When he calls Clinton "the most corrupt person ever to seek the presidency," they cheer in agreement. But Trump's task isn't to delight his supporters, it's to win over people who aren't already in his camp. But only someone who is already a Trump voter could be persuaded by that kind of ridiculous hyperbole.

And that's what Trump is like when he's being presidential.