"Though is he truly off his rocker? Or is he the inventor and curator of yet another set of particularly malignant “alternate facts” because that stuff has worked for him before so why not?"

He is not crazy, just personally absorbed by his own vision of his importance and need to be the center of attention. He succeeds in his misrepresentation of things because it feeds people's suspicions about one another and what happens in government and business (globally, nationally, and at the state/local levels).

As long as conditions exist to feed that suspicion, people like Donald Trump can garner the attention they want.