Welcome to the POST-TRUTH era: Trump as the symptom of
                                THE CRISIS OF VERACITY

We have entered a new phase of political and intellectual combat, in which democratic orthodoxies and institutions are being shaken to their foundations by a wave of ugly populism. Rationality is threatened by EMOTION, diversity by NATIVISM, liberty by a drift towards AUTOCRACY. Science is treated with suspicion and, sometimes, open contempt.

At the heart of this global trend is the crash in the value of truth comparable to the collapse of a currency or a stock. Honesty and accuracy are no longer assigned the highest priority in political exchange.

As candidate and president, Donald trump has demeaned the assumption that the leader of free world should have at least a glancing acquaintance with the truth: according to the Pulitzter Prize-winning fast-checking site Politi-Fact, 69 per cent of his statements are ‘Mostly Fake’, ‘False’ or ‘Pants on Fire’.

In the United Kingdom, the campaign to leave the European Union triumphed with slogans that were demonstrably untrue or misleading- but also demonstrably resonant.

Conspiracist websites and social media scorn the ‘dead tree press’ or MSM (mainstream media) as the discredited voice of ‘globalist’ order, a ‘liberal elite’ whose time is past.

‘Dare to know’ was Immauel Kant's proposed motto for the Enlightenment. Today's counterpart is: ‘Dare to not’.There is a general consesus that the word ‘Post-Truth’ was first deployed in a 1992 article in the Nation by the Serbian-American writer Steve Tesich.

So traumatised were the American people by Watergate, Iran-Contra and other scandals (Tesich declared) that they had started to turn away from truth, and collude wearily in its suppression:

        We are rapidly becoming prototypes of a people that totalitarian monsters could only drool about in their dreams. All the dictators up to now have had to work hard at suppressing the truth. We, by our actions, are saying that this is no longer necessary, that we have acquired a spiritual mechanism that can denude truth of any significance. In a very fundamental way we, as a free people, have freely decided that we want to live in some post-truth world.

Donald J. Trump is lionised by his supporters as a businessman uncontaminated by politics. He is hailed as the master of the deal, the balance sheet and value for money. But – as the first Post-Truth President – he is much better understood as an entertainer than as a politician or as a tycoon.

Instead of force-feeding the electorate with an inventory of facts and the details of his résumé, he bellowed a narrative that imposed a crude sort of order upon the shifting complexities of modern life. He was explicitly divisive, promising a ban on Muslim immigration, a wall along the Mexican border, a return to economic protectionism. But that was the whole point: to offer the great mass of white voters a series of enemies against whom they could unite, a story in which the could play a part, and a mythical plan to
                                  ‘Make America Great Again’.

The effect was narcotic rather than rational: better a fantasy narrative that felt good than none at all. Victory persuaded him that he was now more or less liberated from the pesky constraints of fact. Scroll forward to Trump's first solo press conference as President, in which he claimed that he had achieved ‘the biggest electoral college win since Ronald Reagan.’ When corrected by NBC's Peter Alexander who pointed out that, in 2008, Obama had secured 365 votes – 61 more than Trump – the President muttered: ‘I was talking about Republicans’. Alexander replied that George H.W. Bush had won 462 voters in 1998 and asked, on this basis of his phony claims, why Americans should trust him. Apparently unfazed, the President said only. ‘I was given that information. I actually, I've seen that information around. But it was a very substantial victory, do you agree with that?’

So it is tempting to ascribe the rise of Post-Truth to the rise of Trump. Tempting and wrong. If this crisis of veracity could be blamed upon a single political sociopath, the problem would be containable and time-limited (no US President may serve more than two four-year terms).
Trump is more symptom than cause.

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