Being wrong is a feature for Trump arguments, not a bug. It's easy to see if you can, fort only a second, put yourself in the mindset of a sadist. If you're ly

Being wrong is a feature for Trump arguments, not a bug. It's easy to see if you can, fort only a second, put yourself in the mindset of a sadist. If you're lying, and everyone knows that you're lying, and everyone knows that you know that they know... to then still insist, to continue lying, goes against every social norm practiced among civilised people. For people with conscience, it is torturous to watch. For others, it's high entertainment worth a few island nations and a famine here or there. Nobody believes any of the arguments Trump and his ilk make. They are inflicting this damage on the world, their citizen, and themselves purely because they enjoy the pain it causes the people people they hate: Obama, "the left", scientists, etc. The climate may actually come out of this as a winner: it's adding some emotion to the fight against climate change, where before only the opposition was emotionally attached. What is lost is the idea of the US as a dependable partner for anything. There are no mechanisms of enforcement in international law, which explains why it sometimes seem to move at a snail's pace. Agreements were kept because they served mutual interests. And when some specific agreement was a losing proposition for a country, leaders and their countries felt a moral obligation to stay true to their word. It is also a never-ending repetition of the prisoner's dilemma, and fulfilling your obligations was necessary to prevent a process that could unravel the foundations of international cooperation. The US was the unchallenged winner of the post-WW2 international order. They were and are the dominant military power, and only by actually trying to use the might of that hardware did they ever come close to losing. The true instrument of power was the creation of closely-knit web of international cooperation, from getting the +1 country code, to science, trade, or security, the US was working a winning formula of agreements that were beneficial for both them and their partners. Now, some barely literate psychopath is trying to rule the world with his infantile worldview that life is nakedly a selfish struggle for money and dominance. He may soon realise how reliant the most-connected country in the world is on the goodwill of others. But, sometimes, something breaks and cannot be put back together.