By Erik Baker
After the election of Donald Trump in November, his liberal opponents were near-unanimous about what his ascendency portended for the present political moment. We now live in a “post-truth” era, proclaimed pundits, professors (including a few here at the Kennedy School), and even the Oxford English Dictionary. Fueled by “fake news,” appeals to reality have apparently lost their salience in American political discourse, replaced by “bullshit artists” spouting off made-up narratives based on nothing but their pre-existing political sympathies.
Recently, however, something odd has happened: Trump and his allies have been saying exactly the same thing about their critics. In the aftermath of Trump’s January 11th press conference, in which he shut down a CNN reporter attempting to ask a question by repeatedly shouting “fake news,” it is more important than ever to contemplate the possibility that those early election postmortems may have misunderstood Trumpism in a fundamental — and dangerous — way. Perhaps the “post-truth” barb is a double-edged sword. Perhaps “truth,” somehow, still matters. Continue reading “Truth under Trump: Climate Change, Space Exploration, and “Politicized Science””