“… that means you can do whatever you have to do to get out of that problem.”

– Trump on declaring a national emergency (Frazin, 2025)

Reeling from Donald Trump’s unexpected election and the seemingly ‘anti-economic’ EU referendum, the political centre rushed to find a new family of appropriate terms. This apparently new style of right-wing populism being characterised by profuse and self-contradictory misinformation, the liberal bloc quickly found its branding iron – the lamentable ‘post-truth politics’.

‘Post-truther’ President Donald Trump appears to defy almost every accepted institution. From the ‘legal powers of the POTUS’ to ‘how economics works’, Trump appears to be a flag-bearer for this ‘popular reconsideration’ of historically agreed-upon ‘facts’. Trump’s ‘post-truth’ demonstrates the politicised nature of epistemological frameworks, and more broadly, discourse itself. It demonstrates that what we’ve held as insurmountable ‘economic truths’ since the dawn of Neoliberalism in the 1980s, are, under inspection, revealed to be hidden value-statements – constituent parts of a particular political-social order. Like this, Trump demonstrates that such building blocks are not immutable.

Maganomics.

Where constitutionally being the responsibility of Congress, laws have been passed allowing the President to impose tariffs unilaterally, since the 1930s – if in the interests of ‘national security’ (Looney, Patel, 2025). Through this route, President Trump was able to invoke the National Emergencies Act, and the International Emergency Economic Powers Act by declaring multiple national emergencies, ranging from border security to trade deficits (Domonoske, 2025) – effectively circumnavigating most of the bureaucratic complexities usually required, enacting the tariffs quickly and without congressional approval.

During his 2025 campaign, Trump repeatedly expressed his wish to impose tariffs. His rationale was characteristically varied, ranging from encouraging domestic industrial growth, to preventing wars, to improving national security (Wiseman, 2024). One such claim was that Trump intended to end income tax below $150,000 (Schulz, 2025), securing federal finance through tariffs instead – something deemed mathematically impossible by the Tax Foundation (Luhby, Sullivan, 2025). In fact, most economists appear wary of Trump’s economic reasoning, insofar as revenue gained from tariffs is usually tempered by the shrinkage of associated imports, potential harm from retaliatory tariffs, and rises in costs for companies and households (Ali, Duggal, 2025).

Adding more to this scepticism, after the so-called ‘Liberation day’, the Bureau of Labor Statistics report demonstrated a sharp slowdown in hiring associated with the tariffs, indicative of economic insecurity, and trepidation amongst business – President Trump, however, dismissed these reports as “rigged” and fired the head of the organisation hours later (Kopak, Alba, Strickler, 2025).

But the Trump administration’s problems have not only been theoretical or economic, it has also faced several legal challenges. During numerous hearings, the tariffs were found to be illegal by the Court of International Trade because “the triggering emergency (fentanyl trafficking and trade deficits) bore no rational connection to the trade measures imposed” (Engelland, 2025) – with a further Supreme Court decision being imminent sometime this year.

The Post-Truth.

President Trump’s behaviour in office has, unsurprisingly, provoked controversy across the political community, allowing a new type of centrist outrage to emerge, one which laments the dawn of the ‘post-truth era’. But to appeal to this concept of ‘post-truth democracy’, we seem to do a few things: 1) we imply a time when liberal democracy was ‘doing just fine’; and 2) we neglect to examine the status quo that allowed ‘post-truth’ figures such as Trump to flourish.

In her Lying in Politics (1971), Hannah Arendt identified how political problem-solvers tend towards “translating all factual contents into the language of numbers and percentages where they can be calculated” (Arendt, 1971, p.9) in a manner remote from tangible reality. Even in almost every article thusfar cited in this essay, inordinate detail has been awarded to specific statistics and figures that simply do not translate to immanent, personal reality. Arendt’s critique highlights how the, often unsentimental, ‘hyper-rationality’ of abstracted ‘truths’ fundamentally reduce the scope of lived experience, and contribute to a broader inability to distinguish ‘truth’ from ‘lies’. This positivist approach is endemic to much political-economic thinking and has a fundamentally alienating effect on the public.

Arendt crucially notes that the aim of systemic lying, such as that of Trump, is not to deceive the public per se, but rather to make it difficult to believe anything at all. This process of de-factualisation, Arendt says, is not solely due to the lying of public figures, but as further routed in our contemporary ‘Consumer Society’, advertisement and Public Relations, she says: “[PR] deals only in opinions and ‘goodwill,’ the readiness to buy, that is, in intangibles whose concrete reality is at a minimum” (Arendt, 1971, p.4). Here it seems, whilst, granted, perhaps an interdisciplinary concern, ‘post-truth’ appears to be a key element of neoliberal – if not broader capitalistic – logic that is diffuse in society. 

This is all to say, to invoke a ‘post-truth politics’, we have to imagine a ‘truthful politics’, which becomes difficult without unwittingly leaning on dichotomous tropes such as ‘democratic-undemocractic’, or ‘enlightened-unenlightened’ – thus committing ourselves to a latently colonial exercise in ‘democratic purity’, as per Eduard Said’s Orientalism (2001). In other words, ‘post-truth’ is a means by which our would-be perfect democracy is sullied – that ‘post-truth’ isn’t a natural consequence of the liberal order, if not one of its building blocks. It is as if to say, the ‘economist’s truths’ that Trump defies are not also upholding ever-diminishing wages, rampant homelessness, periodical crashes and a state of near constant foreign warfare.

Ultimately, where the overriding logic in human life becomes the act of the sale, and what is being sold becomes increasingly intangible – archetypes, feelings, lifestyles – the gulf between what is real and what is advertised becomes wider and wider. This process, in whole, creates a fertile ground of nihilism, dissatisfaction and distrust for the Trumps of the world to capitalise on.

Trump.

Acting on economic concerns, Members of Congress who attempted to end the ‘national emergency’, and thus end the tariffs, were blocked by a Republican Congressional majority (Li, 2025). It appears Trump’s continual and blatant transgressions of legal and economic truths are revised by people around him. That is, whether by invoking unexpected rulings, or by having lawmakers reinterpret the law in his favour, the Trump administration’s alleged ‘lies’, ‘misinformation’, and ‘legal questionability’ are allowed to redigested, reintegrated into political reality as they happen. President Trump demonstrates that truth ultimately exists relative to power – moreover, things can be made true, simply by being powerful.

That is, Trump illustrates that ‘truth’ is a fictional value by recreating it in real-time.

“And we do have that kind of emergency.”

– Trump after declaring a national emergency (Frazin, 2025)

Bibliography.

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Arendt, H. (1971) Lying in Politics: Reflections on The Pentagon Papers. New York: The New York Review. Available at: https://web.english.upenn.edu/~cavitch/pdf-library/Arendt_Lying_in_Politics_1971.pdf

D’Ancona, M. (2017) Post truth: the new war on truth and how to fight back. London: Ebury Press.

Domonoske, C. (2025) Trump has declared a ‘national energy emergency.’ What does that mean? NPR. Available at: https://www.npr.org/2025/01/20/nx-s1-5268653/energy-emergency-trump-oil-evs (accessed 12th February 2026)

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