Trump and the Facts

His detractors commit empirical overstretch.

By James Taranto

The New York Times’s Timothy Egan ended last week on a grumpy note, with a column bemoaning that too many Americans are “politically illiterate—and functional. Which is to say, they will vote despite being unable to accept basic facts needed to process this American life.”

Take a wild guess as to which presidential candidate Egan sees as exemplary of the trend. That’s right:

Trump, who says he doesn’t read much at all, is both a product of the epidemic of ignorance and a main producer of it. He can litter the campaign trail with hundreds of easily debunked falsehoods because conservative media has spent more than two decades tearing down the idea of objective fact.

This isn’t the first such piece to appear in the American press this year. It wasn’t the first such piece to appear on the Times op-ed page last week. William Davies, with “The Age of Post-Truth Politics,” scooped Egan by two days.

Which is marvelously rich. Neither Egan nor Davies notes that three weeks ago the Times published an article on its front page arguing that at least for the duration of the campaign, journalistic objectivity ought to give way to an openly “oppositional” approach, Donald Trump being such a danger to all that is good and holy.

Curiously, though, the author of that piece, Jim Rutenberg, and Egan have something in common beside their loathing for Trump: Both are vexed by the distinction between politics and journalism. In journalism facts are paramount, or at least are supposed to be. Rutenberg wants to change that so that journalists can be more effective political actors. Egan wishes politicians (and voters, and especially Republicans) conducted themselves more as journalists do, or at least are supposed to do.

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