Donald Trump is the purest symbol of post-truth America

Is bulls*** worse than lying? The late Princeton philosopher Harry Frankfurt thought so. I am not entirely convinced that it’s always true, but in the case of US President Donald Trump, it most certainly is. I am not denying Trump is a constant liar, but I think the essential characteristic that defines his personality and career as a politician is his BS rather than lies.As Frankfurt wrote in his essay On Bulls***, “One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bulls***.” And Trump is truly a man of his age.I am led to thinking about this by a recent editorial in The New York Times. It accuses Trump of constantly lying, particularly about the war in the Middle East. Did the Times editorial board only just discover that?It was disparaged by Trump’s biographer and critic Michael Wolff, who claims Trump doesn’t so much lie as spew bull: “What it says about The New York Times is that after so long, they continue to fail to understand this guy,” he said as co-host of a Daily Beast podcast. “The truer fact … is that he actually believes what he says.”According to Wolff, inside Trump’s head, “it is such a profound misunderstanding of reality that all of this comes out in such contradictory terms, in the same sentence or in sequential Truth Social posts … to the extent that it means nothing, confuses everything, is helpful to nobody and points in no clear direction at all.”Why tell such unconvincing lies unless the person really doesn’t care about the truth? “No one would tell such lies about such obvious things,” Wolff said. “It’s a much more serious condition, which is that he can’t evaluate, appreciate, analyse and accept reality, which is just a terrible thing. I find it more terrifying, almost, that the leading newspaper in the country is so dim-witted.”