A critique of pure stupidity: understanding Trump 2.0

If the first term of Donald Trump provoked anxiety over the fate of objective knowledge, the second has led to claims we live in a world-historical age of stupid, accelerated by big tech. But might there be a way out?

The first and second Trump administrations have provoked markedly different critical reactions. The shock of 2016 and its aftermath saw a wave of liberal anxiety about the fate of objective knowledge, not only in the US but also in Britain, where the Brexit referendum that year had been won by acampaign that misrepresented key facts and figures. A rich lexicon soon arose to describe this epistemic breakdown. Oxford Dictionaries declared post-truth" their 2016 word of the year; Merriam-Webster's was surreal". The scourge of fake news", pumped out by online bots and Russian troll farms, suggested that the authority of professional journalism had been fatally damaged by the rise of social media. Andwhen presidential counsellor Kellyanne Conway coined the phrase alternative facts" a few days after Trump's inauguration in early 2017, the mendacity ofthe incoming administration appeared to be all butofficial.

The truth panic had the unwelcome side-effect ofemboldening those it sought to oppose. Fake" was one of Trump's favourite slap-downs, especially to news outlets that reported unwelcome facts about him and his associates. A booming Maga media further amplified the president's lies and denials. Thetools of liberal expertise appeared powerless to hold such brazen duplicity to account. A touchstone of the moment was the German-born writer and philosopher Hannah Arendt, who observed in her 1951book TheOrigins of Totalitarianism that the ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or thededicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction ... nolongerexists".