The Uncomfortable Facts Revealed by the Trump Presidency

Up next in this ICA 2018 session is Roopali Mukherjee, who begins by noting the #TrumpArtworks campaign that repurposed famous art by placing Trump in the scene. Such alterations focussed especially on Trump’s counterfactual boasts about the size of his inauguration crowd, and were part of a larger social and mainstream media storm that sought to fact-check and correct the President’s obviously incorrect claims.

This is in fact part of a much wider effort to fact-check the Trump Presidency and document the effects of its policies – from mapping hate crimes to assessing public opinion – that seeks to drown out the fact-free barks from the Trump machinery, and seeks to fight back against the post-truth, post-fact crisis that many perceive to surround the Presidency.

This also points to broader questions about which truths are enlisted or downplayed in mainstream politics, however, and how commonplace assumptions are enrolled in political activism without ever being fact-checked by the media. This appeals to gut-level intuitive beliefs in support of propaganda, and exists especially strongly in racist contexts.

This questions the power of facts and truth over political debate, and shows how the lived experience of marginalised communities – the everyday racism encountered by persons of colour in the U.S., for example – has long been excluded from public debate, and is only rarely glimpsed by mainstream politics and media.

Constructions of Trump as an American anomaly further claims that he does not represent the U.S., and paints the country as committed to openness and fairness – yet the current crisis might point to the fact that he does so all too well. It is a deconstructive jolt