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“You guys took everything that Donald Trump said so literally,” he said. “The American people didn’t. They understood it. They understood that sometimes -- when you have a conversation with people ... you’re going to say things, and sometimes you don’t have all the facts to back it up.”

Second, this eye-popping assertion from Trump supporter/CNN commentator Scottie Nell Hughes on the Diane Rehm Show: “People that say that facts are facts -- they’re not really facts ... there’s no such thing, unfortunately, anymore of facts. And so Mr. Trump’s tweet amongst a certain crowd ... are truth.”

Finally, the president-elect himself, who at a rally to celebrate his successful bribing of Carrier to keep some jobs in the United States, explained that he was impelled to act by a Carrier-employed supporter who had been naive enough to take Trump’s promises seriously.

Watching the evening news, Trump said, he saw the Carrier worker say “ ‘No, we’re not leaving, because Donald Trump promised us that we’re not leaving,’ and I never thought I made that promise. Not with Carrier.”

Then, Trump said, “they played my statement, and I said, ‘Carrier will never leave.’ But that was a euphemism. I was talking about Carrier like all other companies from here on in.”

This was a telling moment, and not just because Trump doesn’t quite understand what euphemism means. The episode simultaneously shows Trump, confronted with Trump on tape, willing to recognize reality and Trump telling us straightforwardly that his promises are not to be taken seriously. They are truthphemisms.

Of course, Trump is not the first truth-impaired president. Ronald Reagan famously insisted on repeating tall tales; he conflated Hollywood with reality. “If you tell the same story five times it’s true,” said White House press secretary Larry Speakes.

And Arendt reminded us a half-century ago about the inherent tensions between truth-telling and political power: “No one has ever doubted that truth and politics are on rather bad terms with each other, and no one, as far as I know, has ever counted truthfulness among the political virtues.”

But today we have the conjunction of a president unconstrained by facts with a media environment siloed into partisan echo chambers and polluted by fake news.

In the face of this, the journalist’s challenge is not to tire in refuting the torrent of lies. The citizen’s challenge is to remain vigilant against the enticing lure of post-truth politics, to recall the admonition of our second president even as our 45th seeks to prove his wisdom an outmoded relic of a pre-post-truth era.

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Ruth Marcus’ email address is ruthmarcus@washpost.com.