The first and second Trump administrations have provoked markedly completely different essential reactions. The shock of 2016 and its aftermath noticed a wave of liberal nervousness concerning the destiny of goal information, not solely within the US but additionally in Britain, the place the Brexit referendum that yr had been received by a marketing campaign that misrepresented key details and figures. A wealthy lexicon quickly arose to explain this epistemic breakdown. Oxford Dictionaries declared “post-truth” their 2016 phrase of the yr; Merriam-Webster’s was “surreal”. The scourge of “faux information”, pumped out by on-line bots and Russian troll farms, steered that the authority {of professional} journalism had been fatally broken by the rise of social media. And when presidential counsellor Kellyanne Conway coined the phrase “various details” just a few days after Trump’s inauguration in early 2017, the lying of the incoming administration gave the impression to be all however official.
The reality panic had the unwelcome side-effect of emboldening these it sought to oppose. “Pretend” was one among Trump’s favorite slap-downs, particularly to information retailers that reported unwelcome details about him and his associates. A booming Maga media additional amplified the president’s lies and denials. The instruments of liberal experience appeared powerless to carry such brazen duplicity to account. A touchstone of the second was the German-born author and thinker Hannah Arendt, who noticed in her 1951 e book The Origins of Totalitarianism that “the best topic of totalitarian rule isn’t the satisfied Nazi or the devoted communist, however individuals for whom the excellence between truth and fiction … no longer exists”.
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