Roger Cohen OCT. 20, 2017, New York Times
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Excerpt:PHOENIX — There are now two definitions of truth in the United States. The first is
that a truthful statement is one that conforms to facts or reality. By this standard,
President Trump is a serial liar.
The second is that truth is defined by “telling it like it is,” or speaking in a direct,
unvarnished way without regard to political correctness or the offense it may give. By
this measure, for millions of supporters, Trump is the most honest president ever.
The United States has already become a post-truth society. Telling it like it isn’t
has become a form of truth. That’s a nation in which chaos is more plausible because
the ability to make rational decisions is diminished. Signal and noise can no longer
be distinguished.
The center, where it was long held that elections are won, evaporates. Violence
becomes more likely because incomprehension grows across hardening lines of
fracture. It may well be that elections, as with Trump, are now won at the extremes.
In Arizona, where Trump’s presidential campaign went from joke to winning
proposition in July 2015 with a speech in which he said Mexicans were “taking our
money” and “killing us,” the honest-man Trump view resonates. Trump was always
about language. It didn’t matter that he was a loose cannon. He connected with
widespread disgust at the political class and the media. This was his winning
intuition: that he could triumph as the subversive plain-speaking outsider.
Trump had that “kind of bluntness and occasionally even crass language which, if
nothing else, at least meant authenticity,” said Jay Heiler, a lawyer considering a run
against Senator Jeff Flake of Arizona, a rare Republican critic of Trump. “The
president just hit a lot of nerves that a lot of conventional politicians didn’t even
know were there.”
Those nerves still tingle. Nine months into the presidency, the support of
Trump’s base remains fervid. I am often asked whether I believe Trump will be
impeached. I’ve taken to responding that it’s more likely he’ll be a two-term
president. I’d put the chances of impeachment at under 10 percent and of his reelection
at about 25 percent.
That’s partly because the Democratic Party has not yet begun a serious
reckoning with its defeat last year. It hasn’t grasped the degree to which it lives, still,
in a coastal echo chamber of identity politics and Trump-bashing. Being anti-Trump
won’t cut it. As Chuck Coughlin, a Republican political consultant who once worked
for Senator John McCain, put it to me: “Somebody who speaks to common-sense
American values — that is what the Democrats need.” I’m not sure who that person
is but am pretty sure she or he does not reside in New York, Massachusetts or
California.
Coughlin went on: “A Democratic party that can’t tell me how many genders
there are, that ain’t flying in this country.”
American fracture is the nation’s overriding condition. It keeps widening. Jeff
DeWit, the Republican state treasurer of Arizona, picked up Trump at the airport for
that 2015 Phoenix rally; he remains an ardent fan of Trump’s “movement of people
dying for something different.” ...
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