Donald Trump lies. A lot. He lies so much that numerous organizations have taken to chronicling detailed lists of each individual lie he tells. If you’re getting mad at me for even suggesting that Trump might lie as you read this, that means they’re working.

Some of the President’s lies are so spectacular they’ve led the people around him to speculate on whether he’s genuinely untethered from reality — potentially suffering from Dementia or Alzheimers, given his old age — or strategically lying to advance his agenda. Many of his aides have posited their own theories.

Kellyanne Conway once argued that he “doesn’t think he’s lying,” and Sean Spicer suggested that Trump was “joking” when he invited Russia to hack Hillary Clinton’s email during the 2016 election.

Ultimately, to understand the effect Trump’s lies are having on our nation after over two grueling years of his Presidency, we must begin by answering a complex question.

What is reality?

Simply put, reality is the world we live in, which is a misleading answer because although we all live in the same reality, we are unable to truly experience it. For humans, a completely objective understanding of anything is impossible, no matter how hard we try. We can only experience the subjective sensory input fed to our brains by our senses.

In a world where objective understanding is impossible, reality, as we use it for practical purposes, is nothing more than a common understanding of a collection of facts.

By assigning symbols to our perceptions of objective reality, we can discover common perceptions, assign common symbols, and construct a factual framework for understanding the world we inhabit — or as Plato would have put it, we can step out of the cave and into the light.

Of course, this conclusion begs another question — what are facts?

A fact, for all practical purposes, is nothing more than a common understanding of the meaning of a symbol.

For example, every letter in the English alphabet is a symbol, and everybody in the United States more or less agrees on the meaning of these symbols and the various ways in which they can be arranged to construct coherent words and sentences. This common understanding of a set of facts is what gives us language and allows us to communicate.

For example, we can say it is a fact that Donald Trump’s name is spelled as it is, instead of Tonlad Drumpf, or any other combination of symbols. This is because there are trusted institutions that maintain, regulate, and update the English language, and our population buys into a common understanding of the relevant facts.

Yet if there were no dictionaries, no birth certificates, and when we polled Americans, half said that the President’s name was spelled Tonlad Drumpf and half said it was Donald Trump, the spelling of his name would no longer be a fact we could take for granted.

This is why Trump thrives on issues on which the public is already polarized. When his supporters hear the press contradict him, counterintuitive as it may seem to those of us who value logic, it’s not the objective facts of the case that matter, it’s the feelings of the Trump supporter.

Trump tells his supporters exactly what they want to hear — which is why Twitter is a crucial tool for him to communicate directly with voters — he uses the platform to reinforce a simplistic and comforting worldview in which he is savior.

Trump voters don’t support him the same way most people support a normal politician. They have genuine faith in him.

It is a rare politician in the U.S. who can connect with voters to the degree of becoming god-like, with F.D.R. serving as the go-to 20th century example and exceptionally popular yet polarizing figures such as Kennedy, Reagan, and Obama also coming to mind. In more authoritarian nations, leaders are literally revered as gods among men — North Korea serves as a case in point.

Trump’s remark at the Republican National Convention last year that, “I alone can fix it,” epitomized the overconfident hyperbole his voters find comforting. With his supporters at least, Trump has gained the upper hand in the information war.

This is why the Washington Post and New York Times can churn out as many impeachable scandals as they want, but in Trump’s own words he, “could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.”

When Trump lies he mocks the very notion of truth. He doesn’t just construct an alternate worldview, he fundamentally undermines the idea of facts as journalists and most federal, state, and local governments in the United States currently understand them. Every day that he uses the bully pulpit to spew falsehoods, maintaining constant chaos in the news cycle, he tears our country further apart — one lie at a time.

Admittedly, some lies seem mostly insignificant and even entertaining at first, like when Trump forced Sean Spicer to introduce himself to the White House Press Corps in January by lying about the size of the crowd at the inauguration. This was the incident that led Kellyanne Conway to coin the infamous term “alternative facts,” spurring an unintentional spike in sales of George Orwell’s 1984.

While some of Trump’s lies might amuse his opponents, others should terrify those of us who fear that the United States is rapidly losing faith in our values and democratic institutions. For the entirety of our country’s existence, it has been taken as fact that the vast majority of Americans could trust the integrity of our elections.

Unfortunately, that is no longer the case for much of our population, largely due to Trump’s repeated insistence that millions of illegal immigrants voted and his flippant dismissal of Russian attempts to influence the 2016 election.

In a tactic that has gone hand in hand with the agenda of the Russian President and former KGB agent whose leadership style Trump clearly appreciates, he has successfully divided and distracted the American population.

Conquering has proven to be the harder part. Vladimir Putin has been a master of distracting, dividing, and conquering in his own country, planting a flag for anarchy and authoritarianism in the information age by meddling in international elections and waging a global information war against his enemies.

The net effect of Trump’s strategy is that we now have less commonly agreed upon symbols, our ability to communicate and therefore cooperate is inhibited, and we’re left with fewer facts on which to base our understanding of reality. As Trump slowly deconstructs our reality, piece by piece, we find ourselves increasingly unable to put it back together.

So, is there hope?

Yes. U.S. institutions are in freefall, and they will be for some time. There’s no getting around the fact that it will likely take decades to reconstruct the national dialogue, debate, and values that Trump has eviscerated in his rampage through our politics. So far, the two firewalls that appear to be preventing Trump from entirely undoing civil society in America are our free press and educated populous.

As outlets like the Washington Post, The New York Times, and countless others bombard Trump by breaking near-weekly scandals that would have effectively ended any of the four administrations before him, Trump remains unpopular with college-educated voters and the longer his administration drags on with few tangible results, the more his support among high-school educated voters slips.

Ultimately, if Trump continues to self-inflict damage at this rate and fails to gain a majority of public support during his Presidency, the U.S. might get a chance to rebuild.

In my opinion, reconstructing reality and our civil society will depend on our ability to remove Trump from office and initiate massive infusions of public funds into public education and broadcasting.

While they are far from a panacea, these two changes would at least be a step in the right direction.