Matt Taibbi: The End of Facts in the Trump Era

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/taibbi-the-end-of-facts-in-the-trump-era-w465615

The End of Facts in the Trump Era
If you connect with America's anger and paranoia, you can steamroll our most sacred institutions without ever having to tell the truth
By Matt Taibbi
23 hours ago


The order floated down from the lunatic's castle late on a Friday. No more visas of any kind from seven countries, Donald Trump decreed, and mayhem replaced a weekend.

Thunderstruck customs officials scrambled to make sense of the surprise order; planes landed and innocent travelers were detained; the Internet exploded; protesters stormed airports everywhere; the acting attorney general refused to go along and was fired like a contestant on one of Trump's shows; it was Keystone Kops meets Pinochet.

And then there were the lies. If there is one thing the first few weeks of the Trump administration have proved, it's that keeping track of what we used to call "objective fact" is now a fool's errand.

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This gets to the heart of a chilling truth that much of educated America has yet to face about the Trump era. Amid all the howling about Trump's deceptions, the far more upsetting story is the mandate behind them – not so much the death of truth in politics, but the irrelevance of it. Donald Trump is proving that if you connect with America's anger and paranoia, you can get by quite easily without facts.

Clearly, we're in the midst of a mass-hysteria movement that approaches the McCarthy era, with the caveat that our version is utterly ridiculous in addition to being terrifying. Take the fable of the "3 to 5 million illegal voters" investigation, another of Trump's early provocations. (Incidentally, there have already been enough baffling episodes in this administration to fill several history books; like a bad hallucinogenic experience, it feels like years have passed already, when it's only been days.) Trump called for a "major investigation" into an apparent incidence of mass voter fraud by undocumented immigrants. This story began just after the election as a report peddled by Trump's favorite conspiracy theorist and aneurysm-in-waiting, Alex Jones of Infowars. But after the inauguration, Trump explained to congressional leaders that he'd gotten additional proof from "the very famous golfer Bernhard Langer."

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http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/taibbi-the-end-of-facts-in-the-trump-era-w465615