If you write a daily column, as yours truly does, surely you must be in constant updating of your vocabulary. And today I’m going to use the term “post truth” not just because Albion’s Oxford dictionary scholars called it the term of the year, but because it makes sense when it comes to U.S. president-elect Donald Trump.
The Oxford dictionary scholars define “post truth” as “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.”
As an example of a post-truth the dictionary says “in this era of post-truth politics, it’s easy to cherry-pick data and come to whatever conclusion you desire.”
From the beginning of his campaign a year and half ago, Trump picked Mexico as the perfect patsy for his insults.
Perhaps you have heard it many times, but surely Mexico is sending all the bad guys it can garner in one shipping to the United States and just “sends them” to steal from decent Americans and rape all the women the scurrilous Mexicans can get their hands on.
This post-truth or generalization of Mexicans was determined to be true by a sizable amount of the population who ended up sending Mr. Trump to the presidency. But again, are all Mexicans thieves and rapists? Definitely not; but it was true in the minds of all those anti-immigrant gringos who also bit Trump’s vote-baiting “promise” that he would raise a wall along the 1,960 mile-long border.
“Build that wall” we heard on many of his rallies in when he spoke to mostly white supremacist crowds.
And when heckled by many of the people who still hate his guts. like Mexican television news anchorman Jorge Ramos. Trump answered “the wall has just gone up 10 feet higher.”
On top of that he was going to have “Mexicans pay for it.” How’s that now for a post-truth?
There will be no wall and it is highly doubtful the U.S. Senate would appropriate the money for such a venture to keep undocumented Mexicans out of U.S. soil.
He also announced that the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was “poorly negotiated” to favor Mexico and has been “a disaster” for the United States. But on Tuesday he announced he would do away with five year old 12-nation negotiations of the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) in his first day as president.
What happened to NAFTA? Didn’t he once say that “as of day one” he would eliminate it? Then he changed his mind he would “renegotiate it.” And finally, when announcing that the United States would pull out the TPP “disaster,” he did not even bother to mention NAFTA.
Take it as another post-truth.
Just last week he announced he’d sanction Ford Motor Company because it was moving its Kentucky plant to San Luis Potosí, Mexico which was but one more of his many lies about Mexico.
Here’s a quote from a Kentucky observer.
“God save the USA’s future leader: In his latest post-truth he prevented the Ford plant established in Kentucky from moving to Mexico. What a frigging hoax.”
Also, Trump says he’s going to deport three million Mexicans with criminal records. Like Barack Obama said, “I wish him good luck.”
There are many more “post-truths” about Mexico that came out of Donald Trump during his campaign that definitely will be unachievable.
But let’s give Trump credit that his fantasy-laden remarks have a name — post-truths — and even made it into the Oxford dictionary.
They also got him to the presidency!
