This week Rick Perry, former governor of Texas and Donald Trump’s energy secretary, told Fox News that he believed Trump was “the chosen one” – chosen by God to lead the United States.

Also this week we saw yet another example of Trump supporters being interviewed. These people told Fox News they supported Trump because “it’s really quite simple ... Family values, honesty, integrity, character and that is everything that president Trump represents.”

Not even anyone in Trump’s own family would honestly think Trump has family values. But then no one in Trump’s family would ever have the integrity to honestly state that Trump’s character is the complete anathema to traditional family values.

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And yet here we are. A man who has not only been accused of rape and sexual misconduct by multiple women, and who paid Stormy Daniels to keep quiet about his infidelity, but who has also been found to have used his charity to boost his own election campaign is seen as some kind of salt of the earth type.

The chosen one of God.

It is time – nay, well past time – to realise the Republican party is no longer a political party: it is a cult. And given the policies pursued by Trump do harm to low income earners and the planet as a whole, it is a death cult.

The big problem for us is that inevitably the conservatives in Australia follow the lead of the US.

Like the black Friday sales, Australian conservatives love to bring over American practices stripped of anything to be thankful for (although given we are talking conservative political practices there is precious little of that).

Fortunately our system of government has a natural barrier to the adoration of leaders that occurs with a presidential system, and yet the cult status is just a few scratches away from the surface.

We see this most directly in the actions of Scott Morrison. Yes, his evangelical beliefs are a first for Australian politics and remind us that the religiosity of the American system is one thing we should be ever vigilant against. But mostly what Morrison has taken on board from Trump is that arrogance and utter refusal to concede error even in the face of overwhelming evidence is a potent weapon in a fractured world.

He also realises the key to this is to do all you can to fracture the world.

Reality is defined now by whatever is chosen by the conservative politicians and their friendly media outlets

It was no coincidence one of the first things Morrison did when becoming PM was to talk about “gender whisperers” in school, despite that not being a thing at all and that it only served to kick one of the most marginal groups in society while appealing to those who gain succour in pretending their ignorant view of the world is not crumbling around them.

When coupled with a continual denigration of certain media outlets (notably the ABC, the old Fairfax and, very much, Guardian Australia), the tactic is to drive your core supporters towards reading news from only certain outlets, especially those who likewise love to punch down.

And when that is done you can carry on in your own little reality.

Yes, social media has a role in all of this, but mostly that is to share the reality perpetuated in media outlets.

Facebook might be the gun, but the distorted views spread in traditional media outlets and by politicians are the bullets.

As with most horrendous aspects of modern political life, it begins with climate change. This week the journal Nature featured an article that suggested the tipping points for our climate might be lower than previously thought.

Rather than having to reach 5C above pre-industrial temperatures, now the point at which there is no avoiding catastrophe is suggested to be as low as between 1C and 2C.

As the lead author of the article said, “We are seeing potentially irreversible changes in the climate system under way, or very close.”

It is extremely scary news, and yet we live in a world where as little as a week ago a national newspaper was able to publish an opinion piece in which it was claimed “there are no carbon emissions. If there were, we could not see because most carbon is black.”

As the kids would say – wut?!

It highlights the problem of the cult in politics – whether it be Trump, climate change, or Morrison’s inability to admit error – how do we journalists respond?

You can’t listen to Perry and then think, well we need to hear the opposite view, or seek some semblance of balance. You can’t decide we need to hear all voices, because giving space to conspiratorial lunacy such as appears in the Australian’s op-ed pages only serves to give such views credence.

When reporting on the prime minister’s actions you can only really do as Katharine Murphy did and call it as you see it.

And yet this week is the prime example of how reality is defined now by whatever is chosen by the conservative politicians and their friendly media outlets.

The robodebt scheme was found by the federal court this week to be invalid. As a result the government, which had previously said the problems applied only to a “small cohort” of debt recipients, were forced to dismantle it. And that small cohort was revealed to be 600,000 of the 900,000 debts that have been issued and that more than 220,000 will need to have their debt waived or refunded.

That is an utterly incompetent outcome that should hound this government and see resignations across the board.

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It won’t though because the government knows its friendly outlets will not touch it. It will get reported, but not for example the way the Australian and other outlets pursued the Rudd government over the stimulus package.

So where does that leave us?

First, we need to acknowledge that the 2016 US election showed how the traditional mode of seeking balance and both sides was used by Trump for his own advantage. It is the view that sees the minor errors of one side being conflated with egregious corruption on the other.

The governments tried this out this week with attempts to compare illegal union behaviour with that of Westpac. It failed because the Westpac crimes were so extreme and abundant, but we still saw the Australian, for example, on its front page headline the defeat of the ensuring integrity bill as “Hanson blindside kills anti-thug law”.

And it is also time for us to realise that when political parties and leaders begin behaving like a cult, we should think about reporting on them as such.

• Greg Jericho is a columnist for Guardian Australia