No one believes Donald Trump is really having conversations with “Zippy” and “James Hoffa”

| 9:34 pm EDT April 14, 2020
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Donald Trump is a deranged man of very few talents. Not only is he the kind of guy who frequently makes up fake people in order to feed his delusions, he’s extraordinarily bad at making up fake people. He’s adopted fake personas like John Barron, John Miller, David Dennison, among other truly lame names. He also thinks long-dead public figures like Frederick Douglass are still alive.

So when Donald Trump claimed during his press conference today that he’d been having conversations with James Hoffa, a lot of observers on social media thought he was hallucinating about union boss Jimmy Hoffa, who disappeared 45 years ago and is presumed dead. It didn’t help Trump’s case that he’d just gotten done talking about someone named “Zippy” who also sounded like a hallucination.

In reality, Donald Trump was referring to James P. Hoffa, the son of the legendary Jimmy Hoffa, and the current leader of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. Zippy Duvall, of the American Farm Bureau Federation, is also very real. But because Donald Trump is so deeply lost in a haze of confusion and cognitive decline in general, and because he was speaking so incoherently while he was talking about them, most people thought “Zippy” and “James Hoffa” were merely hallucinations.