“Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.”
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human
There is a children’s game—though it is usually played by adults—in which one person tells a story, the next repeats it with a small change, and the story is passed along again and again until it becomes unrecognizable. The lesson of the game is supposed to be about distortion: how facts degrade through repetition, how error creeps in through carelessness, how truth is fragile.
But that is not the most interesting version of the game.
The more interesting version is the one in which the story becomes stronger as it drifts from reality. Each teller does not forget the original; they improve it. They sharpen its edges, heighten its drama, clarify its villains. By the time the story returns to the first teller, it is no longer accurate, but it is far more compelling. It feels truer than the truth ever did. No one involved believes they are lying. They believe they are finally saying what needed to be said all along.
Nietzsche understood this long before politics learned to monetize it. Lies, he warned, are clumsy things. They can be exposed. They can collapse. Convictions, by contrast, are armored. They do not need to correspond to reality; they only need to feel necessary. A lie requires maintenance. A conviction recruits defenders.
Donald Trump’s relationship to truth belongs to this second game.
During his presidency journalists attempted to count his falsehoods, as if tallying them might restore consequence. The final number—over thirty thousand false or misleading claims—eventually stopped functioning as indictment and began to resemble a background condition. Not scandal. Not correction. Atmosphere. The remarkable thing was never that the statements were false, but that falsity no longer appeared to matter.
Claims were made, disproven, repeated, contradicted, and reasserted without repair. Correction did not correct. Exposure did not resolve. The lie did not collapse under its own weight, because weight itself had gone missing. What dissolved was not belief in any particular fact, but the expectation that facts should stabilize political life at all.
This is not merely dishonesty. It is a change in the ecology of truth.
The classical lie is parasitic upon truth. It depends on truth’s continued authority in order to exploit it. Even the habitual liar grants reality a kind of sovereignty, because he must still hide from it. Trump’s speech does not behave this way. His utterances do not hide. They flood. They contradict themselves openly and return after disproof with no visible damage. What matters is not whether a claim is accurate, but whether it affirms a conviction already held. The conviction does the work the lie once had to do.
It is tempting to place Trump in a familiar lineage. The demagogue. The strongman. The authoritarian personality. The resemblance is real enough. Authoritarians of the past lied shamelessly. Hitler lied constantly. So did Mussolini. So did Stalin. But their lies lived in a different informational world.
They lied to captive audiences.
Propaganda once depended on containment. Lies could be delivered to segmented populations and insulated from immediate collision with competing accounts. Even when they were flagrant, they circulated inside sealed chambers—party newspapers, state radio, controlled presses—where verification arrived late, if at all. The lie could remain locally coherent. Walls mattered.
Trump does not need walls.
He operates inside an environment where information is abundant, instantaneous, and permanently unsettled. Social media, cable news, algorithmic feeds, and now AI-generated content have shattered the idea of a stable center of verification. There is no longer a single authority capable of saying “this settles it.” Instead of captive audiences, there are algorithmic ones: millions of personalized reality tunnels that feel freely chosen because they arrive wearing the costume of preference.
In such a world, the lie does not need to resemble truth. It only needs to travel.
Repetition replaces verification. Presence replaces correspondence. A claim does not need to be accurate; it needs to be effective. Trump’s utterances function less like descriptions of reality than assertions of force. Their purpose is not to clarify the world but to dominate attention, divide the field into friends and enemies, and saturate the space until nothing else can be heard. Even outrage serves him, because outrage still circulates his name. Silence is the only enemy, and silence is rare.
Jean-François Lyotard named the broader condition long before Trump learned to exploit it. When societies lose faith in grand legitimating narratives—Reason, Progress, Expertise, Institutional Authority—truth does not disappear, but its authority does. It no longer arrives with automatic legitimacy. It must be legitimated locally, contingently, performatively. Knowledge fragments. Meaning destabilizes. Legitimacy becomes something to be fought over rather than assumed.
Trump did not create this condition. He simply behaves as if it were the only one that exists.
Hannah Arendt warned that politics can survive disagreement over values, but not the destruction of a shared factual world. Facts are fragile, contingent, and human, yet without them there is no common space in which politics can occur. When factual truth collapses into opinion, when reality itself becomes a matter of allegiance, what disappears is not truth as such, but the world—the space between people where action, judgment, and responsibility make sense.
Trump’s political success does not require people to believe his statements in a strict epistemic sense. It requires something more corrosive: that falsity loses its power to disqualify. Fact-checking becomes a ritual gesture performed by “the other side,” predictable and therefore dismissible. Truth becomes a team color. The claim’s value is no longer whether it corresponds to reality, but whether it signals belonging.
Jean Baudrillard saw where this was heading. In a world saturated with information, meaning does not accumulate; it implodes. Signs detach from referents. Statements circulate as events rather than representations. The question shifts from “is it true?” to “does it trigger?” “does it bind?” “does it humiliate the other side?” Reality becomes something performed rather than discovered.
This is why Trump’s crusade against “wokeism” is not the contradiction it appears to be. He presents himself as a defender of common sense against relativism, yet his political practice is thoroughly postmodern. Language is treated as power. Meaning is asserted rather than discovered. Narrative dominance matters more than coherence. The conflict is not between modern truth and postmodern relativism. It is a struggle over who gets to define reality once truth no longer settles disputes by default.
Trump does not reject postmodernity. He rejects losing control within it.
This also explains why the familiar liberal remedy—“just return to facts”—so often fails. It presupposes a world in which facts still have the authority to end arguments, in which exposure corrects error, in which reality reasserts itself through repetition. But in the current information ecology, exposure often functions as fuel. To insist louder on truth without rebuilding the conditions that allow truth to bind is to shout into the very void Trump exploits.
There is no return to a pre-postmodern innocence. That world depended on shared authorities and epistemic trust that have already fractured. Pretending otherwise leaves the field open to those most willing to exploit the fracture.
The way out of the Trump world cannot be anti-postmodern. It must be postmodern with intention.
This does not mean surrendering to relativism or abandoning truth. It means recognizing that truth is no longer self-implementing. It must be made durable. It must be embedded in practices, institutions, and incentives capable of surviving fragmentation and saturation. Truth must once again become costly to abandon and rewarding to uphold.
Arendt understood this when she insisted that reality is something humans actively maintain. Facts survive not because experts announce them, but because people act together to sustain a common world. Democracy is not merely a voting mechanism; it is a social practice of living together under conditions of disagreement without dissolving the ground on which disagreement can occur.
Democracy after Trump, like poetry after catastrophe, is not impossible—but it is altered by the knowledge of its fragility. It carries the shadow of its own negation. The danger is not a single dramatic collapse, but continuation without substance: elections without shared reality, debate without reference, freedom without responsibility.
Trump did not kill democracy. He exposed how easily it can be hollowed out.
The task now is not restoration, but reconstruction—not the resurrection of a lost epistemic purity, but the deliberate creation of democratic life capable of surviving after truth has lost its automatic authority. This requires seriousness without nostalgia, pluralism without relativism, and engagement without spectacle. It requires resisting the temptation to fight simulation with louder simulation.
Meaning is not given. It is made. And if it is not made deliberately, it will be made for us by those most skilled at exploiting its absence.
There is another story, less often told.
A group of people are standing in a town square arguing about the time. Some insist it is morning. Others are equally certain it is night. A few argue it is always dusk. Voices rise. Evidence is produced. Watches are held aloft. The sun itself becomes a point of contention. Eventually, exhausted, the crowd agrees on a compromise: everyone will keep their own time.
At first this feels liberating. No authority. No clock tower. No master schedule. Each person is free to live by the hour that feels right to them. But soon the baker and the miller can no longer coordinate. Meetings dissolve into confusion. Trains stop running. The problem is not that anyone is wrong about the time; the problem is that time no longer organizes anything.
So they build a new clock.
Not because it is perfect. Not because it captures time “as it really is.” But because without a shared reference, nothing can be done together. The clock does not end disagreement; it makes disagreement possible without chaos. It is maintained not because everyone believes in it equally, but because everyone understands what happens when it disappears.
Truth used to function like that clock.
It was never infallible. It was never neutral. It was always human, always provisional, always vulnerable to abuse. But it coordinated action. It allowed disagreement to occur inside a shared world. What the Trump era revealed is not that the clock was wrong, but that it had quietly stopped being maintained—and that many discovered they preferred the freedom of private time to the burden of common time.
The postmodern condition did not destroy the clock. It revealed that it was always a construction. Trump simply discovered that once people stop agreeing to wind it, chaos can be sold as authenticity.
The task now is not to pretend we can return to some pristine, unquestioned timepiece. That innocence is gone. The task is harder and more sober: to decide, together, whether we are willing to do the work of maintaining a shared reference again—knowing it will always be imperfect, always contested, and always fragile.
Democracy does not survive because truth is absolute. It survives because enough people agree that without a shared world, freedom itself becomes unintelligible.
The clock will never be right for everyone.
But without it, nothing moves.
And nothing, eventually, remains.
Nothing's Sacred 