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A critique of pure stupidity. Understanding Trump 2.0 by William Davies. Read by Dan Starkey. The first and second Trump administrations have provoked markedly different critical reactions.

The shock of 2016 in 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 a campaign 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.

And when presidential councillor Kellyanne Conway coined the phrase,

alternative facts, a few days after Trump's inauguration in early 2017,

the mendacity of the incoming administration appeared to be all but official.

The truth panic had the unwelcome side effect of emboldening those it sought to oppose.

Fake was one of Trump's favourite slapdowns, 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.

The tools 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 1951 book, The Origins of

Totalitarianism, that the ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi, or the

dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction no longer exists.

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