In times of universal deceit, telling the truth will be a revolutionary act.—Geo
In times of universal deceit, telling the truth will be a revolutionary act.—George Orwell
The phenomenon of “post-truth” rocketed to public attention in November 2016, when the Oxford Dictionaries named it 2016’s word of the year. After seeing a 2,000 percent spike in usage over 2015, the choice seemed obvious. Among the other contenders on the shortlist were “alt-right” and “Brexiteer,” highlighting the political con-text of the year’s selection. As a catch-all phrase, “post-truth” seemed to capture the times. Given the obfuscation of facts, abandonment of evidential standards in reasoning, and outright lying that marked 2016’s Brexit vote and the US presidential election, many were aghast. If Donald Trump could claim—without evidence—that if he lost the [1] election it would be because it was rigged against him, did facts and truth even matter anymore?
After the election, things only got worse. Trump claimed—again with no facts to back him up—that he had actually won the popular vote (which Hillary Clinton had taken by nearly 3 million votes), if one deducted the millions of people who had voted illegally. And he doubled down on his claim that—despite the consensus of seven-teen American intelligence agencies—the Russians had not hacked the American election.
One of his handlers seemed to embrace the chaos by arguing that “there’s no such thing, unfortunately, anymore as facts.”
After being sworn in as president on January 20, 2017, Trump offered a string of fresh falsehoods: that he had the biggest electoral victory since Reagan (he didn’t); that the crowd at his inauguration was the largest in US history (photographic evidence belies this and Washington, DC, Metro records show subway ridership down that day); that his speech at the CIA resulted in a standing ovation (he never asked the officers to sit). In early February, rump claimed that the US murder rate was at a forty-seven-year high (when in fact the Uniform Crime Report from the FBI showed it to be at a near-historic low).
The latter seems particularly egregious because it picks up on an earlier fib that Trump had told at the Republican convention, while searching for a way to push the idea that crime was on the rise. When challenged on this, Newt Gingrich (who was [2] a surrogate for Trump at the time) had the following in-credible on-camera exchange with CNN reporter Alisyn Camerota:
CAMEROTA
Violent crime is down. Te economy is ticking up.
GINGRICH
It is not down in the biggest cities.
CAMEROTA
Violent crime, murder rate is down. It is down.
GINGRICH
Then how come it’s up in Chicago and up in Baltimore and up in Washington?
CAMEROTA
There are pockets where certainly we are not tackling murder.
GINGRICH
Your national capital, your third biggest city—
CAMEROTA
But violent crime across the country is down.
GINGRICH
The average American, I will bet you this morning, does not think crime is down, does not think we are safer.
CAMEROTA
But it is. We are safer and it is down.
GINGRICH
No,