Donald Trump had occupied the White House for less than a month before he decided to launch an all-out attack on the easiest target possible: the media. The day after he held the most unhinged press conference since Richard Nixon went on national TV to declare he wasn’t a crook, Trump took to Twitter to blast the press as “the enemy of the American people.” A few weeks earlier, the president’s chief strategist had expressed the administration’s attitude in equally bellicose terms: “I want you to quote this,” Steve Bannon told The New York Times. “The media here is the opposition party.”

The thing is, “opposition party” is not a description that fits the self-conception of the establishment media. In the face of these unprecedented and incendiary declarations of war against the press, journalists and media pundits continued to preach the talismanic gospel of self-restraint and evenhandedness. In The Baltimore Sun, columnist David Zurawik bemoaned the media’s loss of centrist “balance” under Trump. “ ‘Down the middle’ has been a favored journalistic expression for decades,” he wrote. “But that’s getting to be an increasingly lonely place for journalists like me who still believe wholeheartedly in that value.” On CNN, media gadfly Michael Wolff chastised the press for being in alarmist mode since Trump’s inauguration. “Every situation,” he groused, “seems to be provoking an overreaction.” Fred Hiatt, the longtime editor of the Washington Post editorial page, likewise counseled cool-headed impartiality, with the prim, purse-lipped certitude of a practiced arbiter of elite political discussion. “The answer to dishonest or partisan journalism,” he assured readers, “cannot be more partisan journalism, which would only harm our credibility and make civil discourse even less possible.”

Some in the media establishment, including The New York Times, have ventured so far as to use the word “falsehood” in headlines to describe the administration’s knee-jerk tendency to make shit up. When these fearless publications catch some Trump flunky in a brazen whopper, they want us to know, they will boldly break the decades-long precedent of treating factual distortions from on high with euphemisms like “controversial” or “disputed,” and bravely call an official falsehood a falsehood, a Trump lie a lie.

Here’s a crazy thought: Rather than reflexively assuming its defensive posture of “objectivity,” what if the media went full-offense?

But given that lying is pretty much the business model of Trumpism, and that a whole battery of senior White House aides, from Kellyanne Conway to Sean Spicer to Dark Lord Bannon himself, are enthusiastic masters of straight-faced deceit, it’s unlikely that this sort of semantic breakthrough will make much of an impression on the body politic. For one thing, the sheer volume of Trumpist prevaricating has created a perverse deadening effect; the news that the president and his minions are systematically lying to the American public is no longer exactly news. Besides, a good deal of Trump’s political appeal stems from telling conservatives the kind of lies they most want to hear. When Trump declared at his February press conference that “the leaks are real,” but “the news is fake,” he knew his audience. Trump’s backers not only can’t handle the truth; they don’t even want to know what it is.

In this sense, Bannon was right when he declared that journalists “do not understand why Donald Trump is president of the United States.” If Trump’s lies are what got him elected, and what will keep him popular, then the media’s allegiance to a noncommittal parsing of the blizzard of falsehoods now issuing from the Oval Office is woefully inadequate to our post-truth political environment—particularly since it’s now an article of faith among the Trump faithful that it’s the media, not the president, that’s doing the lying.