Donald Trump came down to the wire on election day doing what he does best, creating his own reality. He has said the Covid pandemic is nearly over, Joe Biden will make the US a socialist country, that he has a health care plan ready to unveil. 
  He’s told adoring fans that he’s creating record numbers of jobs while ignoring that he’s lost more than he has gained. He says, “No administration, no president has done anything near what we’ve done in the first three and a half years.”
  In his stump speech he has said of the Democrats, “They want to terminate religious liberty, eliminate school choice, outlaw private health care.” He claims Joe Biden has early-stage dementia. 
  Trump declared that the Democrats “want to terminate religious liberty, eliminate school choice, outlaw private health care.” He says they want to “shred the second amendment, take away your guns and indoctrinate your children with hateful anti-American lies.”
  He has told the country, “I alone can fix it.” None of it is too preposterous for the President to claim, and none of it is true. To call Trump a liar doesn’t come close to describing the danger he presents.
  The mark of authoritarian rule is the attempt to convince the public that the only source of truth is the head of state. Trump made it clear that one of the central themes of his campaign for re-election was to damage and destroy the press and the people who have made it the focus of their lives to dig out and tell the truth. 
  When the press challenges and checks the President’s fictions, he’s accused them of making things up, of being “Fake News.” He has done that since the day after his inauguration when he inflated the size of his crowd, belying the pictures that showed empty space in the plaza in front of the Capitol. Trump has tweeted that, “There has never been a time in the history of our Country that the Media was so Fraudulent, Fake, or Corrupt.” He has not demonstrated a single time when news coverage was made up or fake.
  Truth is not a concept in Trump’s mind, only words that support him or don’t. There is only Donald Trump. If claiming that the Covid-19 epidemic is over gets him votes from the gullible, he’ll say that. What Donald Trump has done is destroy the notion of shared truth, that there are facts in the world and the political argument is only about how to deal with them. He has derived his power from shattering the gravity of truth, leaving Americans untethered from its grounding pull.
  In these past few months, Trump has embedded the thought among his loyalists that the only way he can lose is if the vote is rigged. He is casting doubt on democracy itself.  Having destroyed truth, Trump convinces his followers to believe, and once he has their belief, fact will not shake them loose. 
  One day Trump will no longer be president. It may be in January, or four years from January. Our government eventually will return to protecting the environment, welcoming refugees and immigrants, and dealing reasonably with the rest of the world. His presidential edicts can be reversed. Most of the damage he has done as President can be repaired. The permanent damage Donald Trump has done is to truth and the concept that it even exists.

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