How should we explain the fact that President Trump got away with making 2,140 false or misleading claims during his initial year in office?

Both the left, in “America’s First Postmodern President” (written by Jeet Heer in The New Republic last summer), and the right, in “Donald Trump is the First President to Turn Postmodernism Against Itself” (written by David Ernst in The Federalist a year ago), have argued that Trump, without knowing the first thing about, say, Michel Foucault, is an avatar of the rejection of objective truth.

Postmodernists, Heer wrote, describe a world where

Fragmented sound bites have replaced linear thinking, where nostalgia (“Make America Great Again”) has replaced historical consciousness or felt experiences of the past, where simulacra is indistinguishable from reality, where an aesthetic of pastiche and kitsch (Trump Tower) replaces modernism’s striving for purity and elitism, and where a shared plebeian culture of vulgarity papers over intensifying class disparities. In virtually every detail, Trump seems like the perfect manifestation of postmodernism.

Along parallel lines, Ernst wrote,

if the only one true thing in the world is that all truth and morality are relative, then anyone who pretends otherwise is either an idiot or a fraud. Hence the contemporary appeal of the antihero, and the disappearance of the traditional hero.

Scholars of contemporary philosophy argue that postmodernism does not dispute the existence of truth, per se, but rather seeks to interrogate the sources and interests of those making assertions of truth. As Casey Williams wrote in The Stone in The Times last April:

Call it what you want: relativism, constructivism, deconstruction, postmodernism, critique. The idea is the same: Truth is not found, but made, and making truth means exercising power.

It is not usually the job of political journalists to analyze postmodernism, so I turned to some scholars who are devoted to the subject.

Trump’s “truths,” as Alan Schrift, a professor of philosophy at Grinnell College, pointed out,

are not socially constructed but emerge from his own personal sense of what will promote his popularity, his power, and his wealth. This is why his particular, and acute, narcissism is so dangerous: he appeals to no social standards at all, only his own imagination as to what is in his own personal interest.

Put in the most straightforward terms, Johanna Oksala, a professor of social science and cultural studies at the Pratt Institute, responded by email to my inquiry:

I don’t think Trump should be called a postmodern president, but simply a liar.

For something to be objectively true, Oksala wrote,

does not mean that we have to have (or can have) absolute and eternally infallible knowledge of it. But our knowledge claims have to be available for public scrutiny by the scientific community and go through a rigorous peer-review process in order to qualify as scientific or objective truths.

In the Trump era, the core concept of truth has become deeply politicized and among Trump supporters there is scant appetite for “a rigorous peer-review process.” Andrew Cutrofello, a professor of philosophy at Loyola University Chicago, argues this point in an email:

In the present political climate truth and power have become uncoupled to a certain extent. It’s natural to wonder whether this means the notion of objective truth has been undermined. But it could be the opposite, namely, that what we’re living through isn’t the loss of the category of objective truth but rather a battle over who has objective truth on their side. In other words, the very category of objective truth has become an ideological weapon, having been displaced from relatively neutral territory to the political battlefield.

For some scholars, the attempt to link Trump’s lies — his falsehoods, his prevarications, his exaggerations, his duplicity, his “truthful hyperbole” — with postmodernism grows out of a misperception of the term.