Imagine this scene:

A guilt-stricken official who worked for President Donald Trump sits down late at night to confess his agony. “What is the cost of lies?” the weary official says into a tape recorder, sitting in his dark kitchen. “It’s not that we’ll mistake them for the truth. The real danger is that if we hear enough lies, then we no longer recognize the truth at all. What can we do then?’’

This confession is not an artifact of the Trump era, however — it is the opening of “Chernobyl,” a masterful HBO drama that turns history into prophecy. The five-part series begins with a Soviet scientist, played by Jared Harris, describing his dismay about the culture of secrecy and lies that led to the near meltdown of a nuclear reactor at Chernobyl in 1986, followed by the cover-up of the full consequences of the catastrophe. After taping his confession, the scientist, Valery Legasov, feeds his cat, stubs out his cigarette, steps onto a chair, and hangs himself.

The theme of lies — the destruction of truth by a regime devoted to self-preservation — pervades “Chernobyl” in a way that is wildly relevant to America in the age of birtherism, Sarah Sanders, and “very fine people” who are neo-Nazis. The corollary is unmistakable. At one point, an engineer who is partly culpable for the nuclear accident tells an investigator that her search for honesty, and his desire to avoid a firing squad, are futile. “You think the right question will get you the truth?” he says. “There is no truth. Ask the bosses whatever you want. You will get the lie, and I will get the bullet.”

“Chernobyl” can be considered the best political film of our times because it illuminates a core problem of the Trump era: the nonstop jackhammer of falsehoods that are drowning out what’s true. The risk is that Americans who are inundated with moral rubbish from the White House and Fox News may lose the will to care about the difference between right and wrong, echoing what happened in the Soviet Union. When everything becomes gray and sluggish, there is no battle worth fighting.

The craft behind “Chernobyl” is transporting — the dialogue, the visuals, the acting, the music. It excels as a horror movie, action film, political thriller, documentary, and fable. You hardly notice the show’s gutting message up to the finale, which is like a dagger you don’t sense until it pierces your heart and you gasp. But the creator and writer of the show, Craig Mazin, has been, like his central character, explicit in saying what it means. “We are now living in a global war on the truth,” Mazin told the Los Angeles Times. “We look at this president who lies, not little ones but outstandingly absurd lies. The truth isn’t even in the conversation. It’s just forgotten or obscured to the point where we can’t see it. That’s what Chernobyl is about.”

The right-wing reaction to “Chernobyl” has proved the point Mazin is making about America and denial. Conservatives complimented the series at first, for what they believed was its portrait of the mendacity of “leftism.” But things quickly changed.