Donald Trump has spent his whole life disrespecting the truth. It has worked very well for him in business, in reality shows and in politics. And even though the size and audacity of his falsehoods have become the epicenter of a global post-truth earthquake, it is undeniable that lies are an old political tool all over the world. The most striking change is in the level of acceptance in a sector of the United States electorate. Until now, this was unthinkable in a country that had never forgiven mendacity, as shown by Watergate and many other high-profile cases of idiosyncratic American Puritanism.<\/p>\n
How then, can the \u201cTrump phenomenon\u201d be explained, the paradigm change that this means for our society, and its possible disruptive consequences? It would take volumes to be able to respond to the complexity of the situation, but in a nutshell, what has happened is that political entertainment and levity have taken over Washington. This has been endorsed by 62.9 millions of Trumpist voters who are allergic to the \u201cdisastrous way of thinking\u201d, sadly invoking contempt towards the thinking classes\u2014the eggheads of the McCarthyist era.<\/p>\n
Political entertainment and levity have taken over Washington<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Indeed, anti-intellectualism has always been a latent force in the United States, it sporadically raises its head, but never had it swept the nation as savagely as it did in the 2016 presidential elections. On this occasion, it was strengthened even further by the dominant wave of emotional politics, which puts personal beliefs before objective facts, before the truth. By people who vote with their guts and welcome everything that confirms their own prejudices, even though they receive it in the form of scandalously false news, disseminated by scores of online sites such as National Report, Liberty Writers News, Breitbart, Empire News, InfoWars or Civic Tribune. And then repeated by an army of Alt-right activists (white supremacy), and by President Trump himself and the assessors that surround him.<\/p>\n
But first of all, it is important to put the numbers in context: the general population of the United States is officially 325 million\u2014including non-nationalized legal residents. 231.6 million have the right to vote, of which only 138.8 million exercised that right, while 92.7 million opted to stay at home. In other words, Trump was elected by only 27% of the voting population and 19% of the general population.<\/p>\n
The numbers explain the perplexity in which the majority of the U.S. population lives. The sensation of being characters from Orwell\u2019s 1984\u2014this year\u2019s bestselling book\u2014, captives, in addition, of what historian Fritz Stern called \u201cirrational popularity\u201d, which makes the masses yield to the \u201cmysterious charisma of dictators\u201d. Trump does not seem like a dictator, for now, but his populist demagogy has an increasingly autocratic flavor.<\/p>\n
Thirty-seven years after the undesirable society that Orwell imagined, the White House has created its own Ministry of Truth from where our Winstons\u2014like the character of 1984\u2014try to inoculate us with huge lies that the propaganda minister Kellyanne \u201cWinston\u201d Conway, goes unpunished by calling them \u201calternative facts\u201d. Just as when they assured us that millions of people had attended Trump\u2019s inauguration ceremony\u2014apparently ghosts because nobody saw them. Or the five million\u2014also phantasmal\u2014that according to the president himself, fraudulently voted for Hillary Clinton. Not forgetting the whoppers that egotistical Trump tried to make us believe, that Obama had been \u201cborn in Kenya\u201d, and that the former President, along with Hillary Clinton, were nothing more than the \u201cfounders of the Islamic state.\u201d<\/p>\n
Only time will tell who the true public enemy is\u2014the press or Trump<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
And so, one example after another (Trump told 132 falsehoods in his first month, according to The Washington Post) this Orwellian presidency is revealing a disturbing strategy: to substitute the objective truth with an alternative, silence mainstream media and purge all dissidence. This is the perfect formula for manipulating public opinion, during the post-truth times that we are in. At least this is what they intend.<\/p>\n
But among all the recriminations, nothing beats his fight to the death against mainstream media, now officially considered by the White House as \u201cthe opposition\u201d. To the extent that during one of his bouts of insomnia at 04:32 a.m., Trump declared the press as \u201cthe public enemy\u201d via Twitter.<\/p>\n
In Trump\u2019s dictionary, \u201cenemies\u201d are journalists who have the audacity to tell the truth, to investigate facts, to monitor abuses of power and to expose corruption. For this reason, eroding his credibility is critical. Until the moment arrives when a large part of society believes only in the president and his subservient media.<\/p>\n
It is now exactly a century since Lenin published an essay titled \u201cThe Public Enemy\u201d in Pravda. It is very ironic that a president of the United States uses an identical rhetoric against one of the institutions that plays a critical role in the world\u2019s oldest democracy.<\/p>\n
Only time will tell who the true public enemy is\u2014the press or Trump.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Donald Trump has spent his whole life disrespecting the truth. It has worked very well for him in business, in reality shows and in politics. And even though the size and audacity of his falsehoods have become the epicenter of a global post-truth earthquake, it is undeniable that lies are an old political tool all […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[86],"class_list":["post-472524","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ideas"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n
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