The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people belie… - Michiko Kakutani

Truth is a cornerstone of our democracy. As the former acting attorney general Sally Yates has observed, truth is one of the things that separates us from an autocracy: “We can debate policies and issues, and we should. But those debates must be based on common facts rather than raw appeals to emotion and fear through polarizing rhetoric and fabrications. “Not only is there such a thing as objective truth, failing to tell the truth matters. We can’t control whether our public servants lie to us. But we can control whether we hold them accountable for those lies or whether, in either a state of exhaustion or to protect our own political objectives, we look the other way and normalize an indifference to truth.

With this embrace of subjectivity came the diminution of objective truth: the celebration of opinion over knowledge, feelings over facts — a development that both reflected and helped foster the rise of Trump.

If a novelist had concocted a villain like Trump—a larger-than-life, over-the-top avatar of narcissism, mendacity, ignorance, prejudice, boorishness, demagoguery, and tyrannical impulses... [one] would likely be accused of extreme contrivance and implausibility. ...less like a persuasive character than some manic cartoon artist's mashup... But the more clownish aspects of Trump ...should not blind us to the monumentally serious consequences of his assault on truth and the rule of law, and the vulnerabilities he has exposed in our institutions and digital communications.