Trump’s truth in politics was to simply declare things he wanted to be correct

The outgoing US president’s preference for assertion over evidence posed an unusual challenge for journalists, writes John Rentoul

For four years, it has been frustrating to watch as commentators have tried to disagree with Trump, treating him like a normal politician (Getty)

Donald Trump, now that we can write about him in the past tense, posed an unusual problem for commentators. Our trade is argument. We take facts, analyse them and express opinions about them. Sometimes the facts are disputed, and we have to say why we think some are right and others wrong.  

But Trump was different. For him facts are stories. As we saw this week, he simply asserts things he wants to be true, regardless of whether there is any evidence for them. That renders the idea of debate redundant. Debate, commentary and discussion depend on the pretence at least that there is an agreed body of fact to be debated, commented on or discussed. Trump just sweeps all that aside, leaving us stranded with, “But that’s not true.”  

For four years, it has been frustrating to watch as commentators have tried to disagree with Trump, treating him like a normal politician. It has been tempting to mutter, “Leave it, he’s not worth it,” but he was the president of the United States, and we had to engage with him, and his supporters, somehow.  

As he prepares to leave the stage, presumably with as little grace as possible, Andrew Sullivan, the conservative commentator, admitted: “I have been wrong about Trump’s appeal.” He said he had “misunderstood why otherwise decent people could support such a foul disrupter of democratic norms”; the reason, he thought, was that they didn’t take his assaults on democracy seriously. “They weren’t endorsing his madness; they were looking past it.”  

Many Trump voters, Sullivan writes, felt they were better off, and they thought that, despite the president’s obvious failings, he would put America first.  

If there is a lesson – because there will be other politicians like Trump – it is that we shouldn’t allow ourselves to be distracted by the untruths. Obviously they have to be pointed out, and on balance I think it was right for Twitter to do something about the use of its platform to spread misinformation. 

But the pointing out and the rebuttal shouldn’t occupy all of our time. We have to leave some space for trying to understand the lives and motives of the 70 million people who voted for the losing candidate.  

Yours,

John Rentoul

Chief political commentator