Thigh-High Politics is an op-ed column by Teen Vogue writer Lauren Duca that breaks down the news, provides resources for the resistance, and just generally refuses to accept toxic nonsense.

This week marks the one-year anniversary of Donald Trump’s election. Perhaps the most concise summary of the way those 12 months have felt thus far comes from the old lady in Titanic: “It’s been 84 years.” The daily stream of atrocities makes it feel that way, at least.

Following the national news cycle is brutally exhausting and endlessly painful — and yet, there is hope.

In December 2016, I wrote “Donald Trump Is Gaslighting America” for Teen Vogue. Gaslighting is a form of psychological abuse in which the victim is made to doubt their own sanity, and that’s precisely what Trump was doing to this country. Nothing has changed, except that now deception is the formal posture of the White House. Since his inauguration, Trump has continued his war on the truth, disseminating a constant stream of disinformation while aggressively degrading the press, and, at an interview last month, the First Amendment itself. His behavior is profoundly dangerous.

In the months surrounding Trump’s win, “post-truth” became a kind of conceptual Band-Aid, as he rejected the very existence of unfavorable stories. “Post-truth” refers to the idea that feelings outweigh facts in the marketplace of ideas; it is the true tragedy of the spread of “fake news.” The threat isn’t so much that your weird uncle believes some cockamamie hoax about pizza pedophiles from HillaryClintonDidBenghazi.com — it’s that the idea of “fake news” allows people to reject certain facts simply because they feel like it.

The public discussion of “fake news” tends to be less about concretely false stories, but more so a judgement of “bias” from individual news outlets and the media in general. Trump’s attack on the truth — which started long before he became president and continues today — includes dismissing the media in its entirety by using claims of overall bias. Through declarations of self-interested subjectivity, he’s concocted a power structure which evades the accountability of facts. The necessity of journalism’s check on the White House’s authority should be supported by not only those who actively oppose Trump, but those who reject totalitarianism. This ought to be a non-partisan stance.

Trump didn’t invent mistrust in media or widespread media illiteracy, but he is actively stoking the flames with the goal of undermining journalism altogether. Alarmingly, some Americans have begun to wholly doubt the necessity of press freedoms. A September 2017 poll conducted by the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Public Policy Center found that “39% of Americans support allowing Congress to stop the news media from reporting on any issue of national security without government approval.” According to this year’s survey from the Newseum Institute, nearly one quarter of the country says the First Amendment “goes too far in the freedoms it guarantees.” That’s a deeply troubling rejection of a free press. As dystopian novelist George Orwell wrote in his 1945 essay, “Freedom of the Park”: “If large numbers of people believe in freedom of speech, there will be freedom of speech even if the law forbids it; if public opinion is sluggish, inconvenient minorities will be prosecuted, even if laws exist to protect them.”

A year in, if you are wondering if it is worth it to stay informed in this fraught political climate, the answer is a resounding yes. A foundation of information is the base point of any democratic participation — especially in the resistance of Trump’s demagoguery. In order to fight back against the White House’s ongoing abuse of power, we must first be bolstered by facts. One year after the election, the “Gaslighting” conclusion is as critical as ever: “Without the truth, we have no foundation from which to resist.”