It’s not just President Trump who’s a big fat liar.

It’s all the schemers around him, too, and now nearly half the country as well.

A fraudulent fib fest has taken over the United States of America. It even has its own made-up, unsubstantiated jargon: “post-truth,” “fake news,” “deep state.” Appropriately, none of these concepts reflects truth, only paranoia.

‘Post-truth’ a misnomer

Post-truth, in fact, doesn’t exist in the entire cosmos; real truth never left us. However, we have inherited an administration in Washington, D.C., that is trying mightily to convince everyone that only their invented version of reality is true and everything else is fake.

Likewise, there is no such thing as “fake news,” really, except on Fox “News.” The vast majority of regular news gatherers and disseminators are honest, serious, honorable people not just committed to truth and accuracy, but viscerally (I know; I spent 40 years in the industry). Just because vetted, proven and unimpeachable information does not match lies emanating from the White House and Congress doesn’t mean it’s fake. It means much of the government is fake.

The so-called “deep state” is another shiny object with no actuality in the real world. This invented bogeyman is the people who do the bulk of day-to-day government work, while the elite governors insist on us believing these noble drones are actually trying to bring down the country by not kissing-up enough to the high and mighty.

EPA liar

Just take Scott Pruitt (please!), the truth- and ethics-averse secretary of the Environmental Protection Agency, whose job, ironically, is not to protect our environment but disembowel its watchdog.

A U.S. Senate committee on May 16 grilled the secretary on a number of ethical concerns it had regarding his official behavior. Among concerns were that on multiple occasions he ordered underlings to switch on emergency lights and sirens on their police-type vehicles transporting him just so he could arrive at his destination quicker. Reportedly, when a subordinate refused to flip on the flash bangs, he was fired.

Despite these cartoonish orders being well-documented in an email from Pruitt’s security detail and in other communications, Pruitt blithely lied to senators at his hearing. “I don’t recall that,” he said.

Nothing to see here, folks. Yet another bit of fake news generated by the deep state to bring down an honorable and humble public servant.

If only.

Pruitt also cited a certain “threat assessment” as the reason for ordering a 24/7 security detail to accompany him and his family to Disneyland and the Rose Bowl, although the assessment wasn’t issued until after the nonofficial trip. The cost of the protection? $3 million. Oh, and the infamous $43,000 phone booth in Pruitt’s EPA office? The Government Accountability office last month ruled that it was an unlawful use of taxpayer funds. He also obtained suspiciously dirt-cheap $50-per-night D.C. lodging from the wife of a man who lobbies the EPA, another among 16 investigations of Pruitt’s behavior by federal overseers.

Democratic Sen. Tom Udall of New Mexico, generally “one of the mildest members of the senate,” characterized Pruitt’s behavior as “disastrous” and “a betrayal of the American people,” wrote Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank in a recent piece. Veteran legislator Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) called the EPA chief a “laughingstock.”

Pruitt calmly denied everything the senators said he had been accused of. But, Milbank noted a possible “tell” in his column.

“Pruitt maintained a placid expression; only his legs jiggling under the witness table betrayed his agitation.”

This is how the “post-truth” crowd operates. Deny, resist, attack, never apologize. Then distract with more lies.

Truth-tellers push back

One victim of the post-truth era is former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, crudely fired earlier this year in a Trump Tweet. In a commencement speech at Virginia Military Institute on May 16, Tillerson starkly warned cadets that American democracy is under threat by a growing “crisis of ethics and integrity.”

“If our leaders seek to conceal the truth, or we as people become accepting of alternative realities that are no longer grounded in facts, then we as American citizens are on a pathway to relinquishing our freedom, … When we as people, a free people, go wobbly on the truth even on what may seem the most trivial matters, we go wobbly on America,” he said.

The situation is dire, he warned:

“If we do not as Americans confront the crisis of ethics and integrity in our society and among our leaders in both the public and private sector — and regrettably at times even the nonprofit sector — then American democracy as we know it is entering its twilight years.”

We should start the confronting at the top.

Keep in mind that Tillerson is no wingnut outlier. Other thoughtful, knowledgeable people have grave concerns about the direction the United States seems to be heading, like Federica Mogerini, the European Union’s top foreign policy official. New York Times columnist Roger Cohen wrote this week that Mogherini “heaped scorn” on the American president, pointing out that:

“ … screaming, shouting, insulting and bullying, systematically destroying and dismantling everything that is already in place, is the mood of our times.”

She warned that “this impulse to destroy” leads nowhere good.

What eats America?

Cohen disparaged the current American moment:

“What eats at America — and so its place in the world — is moral rot: unrelenting blight that emanates from on high. When it comes to rottenness, Denmark is passé. Try the White House.”

Purposeful dishonesty about reality is the canker in its heart, Cohen believes.

“[President Trump] traffics in slurs and untruths. The deepest form of rot is the erosion of the distinction between truth and falsehood. Totalitarianism was one big lie perpetrated on human beings reduced to the often hopeless quest for survival in a fog.”

In his speech, Tillerson, the former head of ExxonMobil, urged citizens to demand that America’s future be “fact-based, not based on wishful thinking, not hoped-for outcomes made in shallow promises, but with a clear-eyed view of the facts as they are and guided by the truth that will set us free to seek solutions to our most daunting challenges.”

He sounds like an icon of rationality railing against the know-nothingism and hidebound delusions of the medieval Renaissance’s all-powerful Catholic ecclesiastical establishment. Like Galileo pleading with the church hierarchy to face reality and accept the demonstrable truth that the earth is round and not the center of the universe.

No luck then, as now. Galileo was threatened with death then. Robert Mueller with political annihilation now.

When rationalist Greek philosophy re-emerged in Europe late in the Middle Ages, the Catholic Church ruthlessly threatened and persecuted all innovative thinkers who pointed out glaring inconsistencies and outright impossibilities in Christian scripture. Failing that, the church moved the goalposts and proclaimed through intellectual “saints” like Anselm and Aquinas that, in fact, the impossible-seeming assertions in scripture were actually based on reason after all. Because, clearly … God could never be unreasonable. There was also a fair amount of intellectual silliness, which I wrote about previously.

Trump and his minions are following the same bogus, self-serving script today. If you declare that whatever you declare must be true, then, voila, it most certainly is.

Or, I humbly suggest, not.