To authoritarians, language is a weapon, usually deployed in the service of an emotional half-truth: something you believe to be true even if it isn’t. Truth has to become meaningless — “What is a fact?” — in order for this strategy to work and morality to become a shapeless thing.

We saw it when Vice President Mike Pence called the former Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio a champion of “the rule of law.” Arpaio is a convicted criminal later pardoned by Trump. You can say he’s a hero to the political right, or a fighter, but by no standard is a sheriff who was repeatedly called out for violating the law a champion of the rule of law.

And we saw it in graphic detail over the last week with the Trump administration policy of ripping migrant children from their parents. The cages holding weeping kids are “essentially summer camps,” in the words of the Fox News host Laura Ingraham.

Worse, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said the administration’s zero-tolerance policy that led to 2,300 children being taken from their parents didn’t exist — “period.” A day after saying this, she defended the policy that doesn’t exist. And on Wednesday, Trump signed an order trying to resolve a crisis that he created, after saying earlier that he couldn’t stop it because it was the fault of others, even if it did exist.

After a while, people come to “believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true,” wrote Hannah Arendt, the German-born philosopher, in describing how truth lost its way in her native land.