Kellyanne Conway, master of the dark art of normalizing Trump's diseased reality.

Before Donald Trump and his "alternative fact"-slinging hired hands arrived on the White House scene, fact checking had receded into the background of journalistic endeavors. Sure, all politicians fibbed a bit, but once the votes were counted, wasn't that all fair game in the political sport of spin?

But now that the occupant of the Oval Office has literally severed ties reality and seems to delight in breaking Washington's truth-o-meter daily, fact checking is becoming all the rage, reports the AP:

"We're writing about a president who makes quite a number of misstatements," said Glenn Kessler, the Washington Post reporter whose regular fact checks award "Pinocchios" based on the magnitude and brazenness of false claims. "This has increased our workload and increased the level of interest in fact-checking." The number of unique visitors to Kessler's web page in January was 50 percent higher than in October, its previous busiest month, and 15 times greater than in January 2013, he said. The Associated Press routinely publishes AP Fact Checks on political discourse. Last week, the AP premiered an aggregation of disputed political statements under the headline, "A week's supply of baloney." A separate fact check on Conway's false claim of a Bowling Green "massacre" on Thursday was the most-read story on the APNews.com website Friday. Similarly, on Monday, readers spent more time with a story examining President Donald Trump's claim about the media underplaying incidents of terrorism than they did with any other news item that day.

If "A week's supply of baloney" can't make fact checking sexy again, then just about nothing can.

Last week, I posted a piece on all the leaks coming out of Trump's White House making "journalism great again." The title was a bit tongue in cheek, but truthfully, our lyin' pr*sident appears to have given journalism a real shot in the arm. Nothing like being carpet bombed with lies to wake reporters up out of a stupor.

It remains to be seen whether Trump's war on the truth will ultimately succumb to what I have been calling the "vast factual conspiracy," but early signs lend hope that truth still stands a chance—even in Trump’s post-fact regime. And not simply in spite of Trump's diseased reality, but because of it.