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The Post-Truth Era of Politics

RUTH MARCUS on

WASHINGTON -- Welcome to -- brace yourself for -- the post-truth presidency.

“Facts are stubborn things,” said John Adams in 1770, defending British soldiers accused in the Boston Massacre, “and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.”

Or so we thought, until we elected to the presidency a man consistently heedless of truth and impervious to fact-checking.

` Oxford Dictionaries last month selected post-truth -- “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief” -- as the international word of the year, and for good reason.

The practice of post-truth -- untrue assertion piled on untrue assertion -- helped get Donald Trump to the White House. The more untruths he told, the more supporters rewarded him for, as they saw it, telling it like it is.

As Politico’s Susan Glasser wrote in a sobering assessment of election coverage for the Brookings Institution, “Even fact-checking perhaps the most untruthful candidate of our lifetime didn’t work; the more news outlets did it, the less the facts resonated.”

 

Indeed, Hannah Arendt, writing in 1967, presciently explained the basis for this phenomenon: “Since the liar is free to fashion his ‘facts’ to fit the profit and pleasure, or even the mere expectations, of his audience, the chances are that he will be more persuasive than the truth teller.”

So there is no reason to think Trump is about to suddenly truth-up. Indeed, all signs are to the contrary -- most glaringly Trump’s chockfull-of-lies tweet that “I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.”

Trump and his aides are not embarrassed by their post-truthism -- they embrace it. Three data points from last week:

First, quasi-fired Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski at Harvard, making the astonishing assertion that the media’s failing during the campaign was not that it scorned Trump -- it was that it believed him.

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