It’s a fact.

Donald Trump is now the Republican party’s presidential nominee: the “hair apparent.”

But facts, in Trump’s campaign, are thin on the ground.

Trump’s ascendancy has proved that in politics, as in war, the first casualty is truth. And his critics say Trump’s fast-and-loose relationship with facts has so surpassed the truthiness of earlier eras that it has entered a parallel “post-truth” universe.

“This is a quantum leap,” says Ralph Keyes, author of The Post-Truth Era: Dishonesty and Deception in Contemporary Life. “Bill Clinton had a fraught relationship with truth. Hillary had her own problems. But nothing on the scale of Donald Trump. He is the perfect illustration of the post-truth candidate.”

Trump has demonstrably lied, prevaricated and waffled on subjects from his business success and relationships with women to terrorism and world trade. He has done it even when there’s no need to.

He has impersonated his own spin doctor in interviews. He has falsely denigrated Muslims and Mexicans, spearheaded the bizarre “birther” movement claiming Barack Obama was born outside the U.S., pretended he knew nothing about a Klu Klux Klan leader who backed him, and claimed that the vast majority of white murder victims were killed by black people. Daily, the list gets longer.

Although “truthiness” has been creeping into the American political discourse for decades — even before comedian Stephen Colbert used the term to skewer George W. Bush’s attempts to justify his invasion of Iraq — Trump has left it behind in the dust.

“What’s new is that Trump has no shame,” says Ari Rabin-Havt, co-author of Lies, Incorporated: The World of Post-Truth Politics. “His thing is to lie shamelessly, without remorse. Trump has no boundaries.”

He adds, “Trump is the first person to convert a reality show into a campaign. It’s a pretty spectacular moment in American history for that to happen. It frankly sickens our politics.”

It’s not an entirely new phenomenon, says Keyes. The stage has been set over decades of “relativist” philosophy, in which you can have your own facts as well as your own opinions.

“Trump isn’t working in a vacuum. And it’s not simply Republicans. And it’s not just politics. We’re living in a very relativist ethical environment.

“We’re seeing in the current campaign the ascendence of reality shows, talk radio, cable news, in which the ability to attract attention and be louder than the next person invites deception.”

When truth doesn’t capture attention, he adds, more exciting lies will fill the gap. “An ambitious person could say, ‘if telling the truth won’t get me where I want to go, I’ll fudge a little.’ Eventually we end up with Donald Trump.”

On the political landscape, fertile ground was prepared by campaign finance rules that allow huge sums to funnel into attack ads in the media, says fraud expert Pamela Meyer, author of Liespotting: Proven Techniques to Detect Deception.

“I don’t see it as a Trump-led phenomenon,” she says. “But now we’re seeing bottom. We’ve reached a potential pivot point where we’re saying ‘we’ve gone far enough here, allowing low, deceptive dirty tricks behaviour into our debate.’”

Trump is also enabled by followers whose own relationship with truth is shallow, Meyer adds. “There’s a large portion of them who don’t care. They’re not looking for an honest candidate, but an outsider who can speak to them because they feel unprotected. On some level they don’t care that he’s lying, because ironically, they think it’s authentic.”

While they may be tone deaf to Trump’s untruths, it’s his anger that strikes an authentic note.

“That’s his appeal,” says Rabin-Havt. “One effect is the division of the electorate. Liberals and conservatives no longer disagree on what to do about our country, but on the core facts of our ideology. They disagree about the natural world. People do have their own facts.”

Trump is also operating in a “click economy,” where celebrity, entertainment and politics merge, the Internet delivers a bewildering mass of data, and truth has a looser link with personal popularity.

The more exciting the liar, the more attention he gains and the bigger the audience ratings become. It’s a proposition that has sent a belated shiver of remorse through the media as Trump climbs closer to the White House.

Some critics wonder if Trump simply doesn’t understand the facts: an equally alarming prospect for a man who would be in charge of crucial international negotiations, global treaties, decisions on national security, launching wars and pressing the nuclear button.

Some of his ideas originate in the post-truth world manufactured by a cadre of professional spinners devoted to undermining the facts on public policy issues as sweeping as climate change, government debt, health care, gun control and abortion, says Rabin-Havt.

“It’s not that they created a world of lies,” he told the literary news site Signature. “They created a world where truth doesn’t exist. If half the population believes the sky is blue, and half the population believes the sky is orange, then what colour is the sky? To each half two different things are true, so you enter a world without truth.”

Has truth been Trumped for good?

“I don’t think we’ve hit a point of no return where the world is completely deceptive,” says Meyer.

“What we have is a lack of trust, and many institutions need more leadership in order to fix that. But I do think people really want to get to the truth. When we see an enormous amount of lying we have to say it publicly and privately. We must open up public and private debate. As individuals we can take back the truth.”

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Little White House lies: Looking back on a half-century of truthiness

Donald Trump isn’t the first high-profile politician to be “economical with the truth.”

Here are some of the biggest presidential whoppers in modern history: a cautionary tale of what can happen when the White House is taken over by the less-than-truthful.

Lyndon Johnson

“We will seek no wider war.”

That far-fetched fib was uttered after the Gulf of Tonkin incident in August 1964, when U.S. destroyers were allegedly attacked by the North Vietnamese in the Gulf. Although it later emerged that American vessels had attacked the North Vietnamese, Johnson won approval for escalating the Vietnam War. Within a year 180,000 U.S. troops were on the ground.

Richard Nixon

“I am not a crook.”

Where to begin? Nixon was answering sticky questions from reporters in Orlando in 1973 when he was grilled on unpaid income tax, possible kickbacks and the Big One — Watergate. The answer didn’t go down with the media, but it went down in history. Nixon resigned nine months later to avoid impeachment.

Ronald Reagan

“We did not, I repeat, did not trade weapons or anything else (to Iran) for hostages, nor will we.”

The incredibly convoluted Iran-Contra affair heaped lie upon lie to cover up American involvement in trying to overthrow the Nicaraguan government and bring back hostages from Lebanon. It drew in Israel, the CIA and Nicaraguan Contra rebels in illegal dealings. Two administration officials were indicted, but Reagan escaped unscathed.

George H.W. Bush

“Read my lips: no new taxes!”

It was a rousing acceptance speech from the Republican Party’s 1988 candidate, playing to the party’s hardline anti-taxers, as well as disenchanted voters. But when the deficit escalated, growth shrank and Bush had to make a deal with Democrats in Congress to raise taxes, even his Gulf War popularity couldn’t win him the 1992 election.

Bill Clinton

“I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky.”

(He also didn’t inhale.) The 1998 scandal of sex in the Oval Office with 22-year-old intern Monica Lewinsky prompted an investigation, impeachment, a Senate trial and acquittal for Clinton on perjury charges. It also led to head-scratching attempts to define “sexual relations.” And endless fodder for satire.

George W. Bush

“Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised.”

While fighting the Afghanistan war, Bush switched his focus to Iraq, claiming it was supporting terrorists and was a “growing danger” to the U.S. because of its weapons of mass destruction. The invasion was launched in 2003. No WMD were found. It didn’t end well.

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