The fear many Americans have of a possible Donald Trump presidency is unlike any in U.S. electoral history.



It has little to do with the usual reasons partisans want the other party to fail at the polls. It isn't because Trump is making promises about taxes and spending that unsettle liberals or conservatives or anyone else. This has not been a campaign about policy.

The Trump candidacy is about feelings. "Mr. Trump is the leading exponent of 'post-truth' politics -- a reliance on assertions that 'feel true' but have no basis in fact," the right-leaning British magazine The Economist writes.

Dictators, revolutionaries and advertising executives have always known that feelings are far more powerful than facts. But few political movers and shakers in this country ever worried all that much about the power of feelings-based politics because American democracy was mature and informed. At least, that always felt true.

No more. Trump has put the lie to such assumptions about the U.S. electorate. "There was almost always a line that wasn't crossed in years past, a sort of even-partisans-can-agree-on-this standard," the Washington Post's Chris Cillizza wrote last November. "Now, in large part because of Donald Trump's candidacy, that line has been smudged out of existence. Daniel Patrick Moynihan's famous quote that 'you are entitled to your own opinion ... but you are not entitled to your own facts' is no longer operative in this campaign."

Trump's supporters say this is unfair, that their candidate tells it like it is. But the facts, those pesky things, remain in place, hunkered down but still breathing. Here's The Economist, again, on the Republican presidential nominee: "He inhabits a fantastical realm where Barack Obama's birth certificate was faked, the president founded Islamic State (IS), the Clintons are killers and the father of a rival [Republican] was with Lee Harvey Oswald before he shot John F. Kennedy."

Yes, Trump said all of those things -- often couched in his "a lot of people are saying" innuendo style -- and his core backers have cheered.

He's also hammered Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton as "Crooked Hillary," and here is where the press has helped him out. The notion that Clinton is corrupt, sold by Fox News and Republican politicos for two decades, certainly feels true. And so the press has pursued it this year with investigations of Clinton's emails and the Clinton Foundation, raising some legitimate questions and thus further strengthening the "Crooked Hillary" perception even though reporters have failed to come up with a lot of meaningful facts.

They've also "normalized" Trump himself by covering him like a mainstream presidential candidate. Journalism professor Jeff Jarvis, a Clinton supporter, insists the "media have become [Trump's] willing accomplices, treating his offensive and insane pronouncements -- for example, that a wall blocking Mexico will solve our problems, that Hillary Clinton is a bigot -- as serious topics that should be discussed for hours on end rather than disproven, ridiculed, and dismissed with facts and reason."

Jay Rosen, another journalism professor, has concluded that Trump's candidacy is a "civic emergency," that our democracy -- our liberty -- cannot survive a post-truth strongman presidency.

Yes, I do. I said Trump is a civic emergency, and part of that emergency is that some patriotic and reasonable people support him. — Jay Rosen (@jayrosen_nyu) August 16, 2016

In Rosen and Jarvis' view, it is journalism's responsibility to put aside the he-said/she-said approach to coverage that has long dominated political-election news, that this year it's a false equivalency that threatens our collective values.

Jarvis wrote: "This is my generation's 'What did you do in the war, Daddy?'"

What he means is that journalists who fail to forcefully oppose Trump -- not for his policy positions, not for his partisanship, not because he's a Republican, but for his shameless lying and his expert manipulation of facts -- will suffer history's unforgiving judgment.

That very well might be true. At the same time, could the press actually make a difference? National Review -- the most respected conservative journal in the country, founded more than 60 years ago by the late conservative icon William F. Buckley Jr. -- published an issue in January devoted exclusively to the case against Donald Trump. And it didn't matter. At all. In fact, it might have helped spur conservative voters to embrace Trump. Many voters are so frustrated at the political status quo, so angry at cronyism and obstructionism and partisanship for the sake of partisanship that they don't trust anyone who's ever had anything to do with politics or the political system. National Review, established as an insurgent check on liberal hegemony, is now viewed by conservative voters as The Establishment, as The Enemy.

Donald Trump thrives not because he's been aided and abetted by the mainstream media but in large part because of social media. The lies he embraces and manipulates, The Economist points out, spread among conspiracy theorists and white nationalists and disaffected voters because these Americans trust like-minded people on their message boards and in their Facebook and Twitter feeds more than they trust the "lamestream media."

The Economist, in its typically British, understated way, finds this "worrying." Post-truth politics, the magazine writes, is a harbinger of authoritarianism, of Vladimir Putin-style politics. Of fascism.

Yes, that word -- fascism -- has been thrown around a lot this election season. But it's not just a pejorative liberals are using to warn voters about Trump. Fascism -- simply defined as authoritarian leadership built on extreme nationalism -- has been on the fringes of America's politics for generations but has never gained much traction. This year is different thanks to Trump's unique skill set and the specific conditions -- technological and economic -- of the moment.

"Trump may not be fascist, but he is empowering their existing elements in American society," journalist and author David Neiwert wrote last year. "Even more dangerously, his Tea Party brand of right-wing populism is helping them grow their ranks, along with their potential to recruit, by leaps and bounds. Not only that, he is making all this thuggery and ugliness seem normal. And that IS a serious problem."

Clinton, like many Democrats, appears to be unnerved by the anger and hatred Trump's candidacy have unleashed.

"To just be grossly generalistic, you can put half of Trump supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables," Clinton said last week. "Right? Racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic, you name it. And unfortunately, there are people like that and he has lifted them up. He has given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people, now have 11 million. He tweets and retweets offensive, hateful, mean-spirited rhetoric."

Evan McMullin, the conservative, little-known former CIA case officer who's running for president as an independent, is more hopeful. He considers Trumpism not a rising political force but an aberration that will be defeated because American voters ultimately will get ahold of themselves and decide to do what they historically have done best: identify and solve problems.

"I believe the opportunity in this country is in this -- liberty and tolerance," McMullin recently said. "I believe that we have an opportunity to move the conservative movement forward with ideas that shouldn't be so difficult, like acknowledging climate change [and] respecting the fact that not everyone will believe the way we believe."

-- Douglas Perry