Alternative Truths

Read Alternative Truths Storyline:

“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.”