Alternative Truths

“Elections have consequences,” Barack Obama told riled up Republican critics three days after becoming U.S. president in 2009. “And at the end of the day, I won.”

Yes, elections have consequences. Donald Trump’s Electoral College victory in 2016 has had wide-ranging consequences that many Americans had never dreamed likely, from unraveling four decades of environmental regulation to promoting a “Great, Great Wall” along America’s southwestern border. A small but telling consequence of Trump’s triumph is that the Oxford English Dictionary’s 2016 “word of the year” was “post-truth” — an adjective defined as “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.”