Editorial Note
How can we understand Donald Trump’s propensity to lie? Is there a psychoanalytical explanation?
On 20 January 2017, Donald Trump announced to the world that his inauguration crowd was the largest in history. Photographs and the Washington Metro’s own ridership data told a different story. The following day, Press Secretary Sean Spicer persisted with the claim. However, when challenged, Trump’s advisor Kellyanne Conway coined the phrase that would become the administration’s operating doctrine: “alternative facts.” It was an egregious falsehood when the truth was demonstrable, verifiable, and photographed by credible sources. Over the years, it became a test of whether a democratic public could be deceived into believing what it had already seen. It set the template for four years of industrial-scale mendacity that now extends into his second presidency. This scale and normalisation of falsehood within a democratic system is rare and deeply destabilising. In effect, Trump’s presidency was launched by a lie and has remained defined by it ever since.