SEATTLE _ Last year, the president's defender Rudy Giuliani went full Orwell when he declared on national television that "Truth isn't truth," and objective facts are "in the eye of the beholder."
Such language epitomizes the era of President Donald Trump, who has told thousands of lies in office as regularly as a normal person says "hello," and has demonized inconvenient facts as "fake news."
Politicians frequently spin or shade issues or events to their advantage. But the wholesale denial of objective reality is something new, especially from the highest elected official in the land.
We've been veering toward this dangerous terrain for some time. A senior adviser to President George W. Bush made a famous comment to writer Ron Suskind for a New York Times Magazine article. At the time, the statement seemed to personify the hubris and folly of unnecessary, costly wars and lies about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.
The aide dismissed people living "in what we call the reality-based community," who believe that "solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality."
"That's not the way the world really works anymore," the aide continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. ... We're history's actors, and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."
Bush supporters also employed lies in the swift-boat attacks on Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry's Vietnam War record in 2004. Before that, in the 2000 Republican primary election, they spread rumors that Sen. John McCain's adopted daughter, Bridget, was McCain's illegitimate child with a black prostitute. That one cost McCain the South Carolina primary and perhaps the nomination.
In the age of Trumpism, the debasement of reality itself has taken on a more sweeping and sinister character.
This ranges from overstating the size of his inauguration crowd to claiming the president can rewrite the Constitution, and denying human-caused climate change is real. The first misstatement goes to the heart of a needy personality. The latter two endanger our republic and our planet.
Ahead of November's elections, Trump and Republicans used lies to stoke fears of an "invasion" of illegal immigrants, and minority vote fraud.
With lies as the new currency of political discourse, the only "reality" becomes signaling to one's political tribe.
The castoff from facts isn't confined to the right, a political radicalism often still going by the quaint and misleading name "conservatism." The American left has its own blind spots, although they are not as dangerous to the planet or democracy.
This is America 2019.
And Seattle, with its Big Tech brains, renowned university and higher-than-average number of adults with college degrees, isn't surrounded by a wall. It must live in this changed nation, one where a significant portion of the electorate has contempt for such blue outposts. The consequences range from lost federal funding and a gamed census to poisonous federal policies.
Living in this America won't be easy.
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