No, it's all about the next distraction from his bad behavior.

I'm reading a book by the famous American satirist Andy Borowitz. Profiles in Ignorance: How America's Politicians Got Dumb and Dumber. He focuses on Reagan, Bush II, and Trump, and I'm in the Reagan chapter now in which we learn how his enablers pretty much wrote the playbook that 45/47 is running with now.

Reagan demonstrated that, in the hands of a talented TV performer, one joke could sink a thousand facts. But he had enjoyed another advantage as he cruised to victory in 1980: an all-star roster of morally dubious advisers. His gang of goons included Roy Cohn, the disgraced former aide to Senator Joseph McCarthy, and three hard-charging political consultants, Roger Ailes, Roger Stone, and Paul Manafort. It was hard to imagine another Republican presidential assembling such a team, or coming up with a campaign slogan as winning as Reagan's: "Let's Make America Great Again."⁴⁰

Reagan was able to dismiss all of Jimmy Carter's knowledge and facts by uttering "There he goes again" and deploying lots of hackneyed Hollywood film lines whenever he didn't know what he should really say.

When a satirist writes history it's fascinating and to the point. And from the introduction to the book:

One final point. For the past twenty years or so, I've written a column in which I've made up news stories for the purpose of satire. In this book, I've made nothing up. All the events I'm about to describe actually happened. They're a part of American history. Unfortunately.