The Post-Truth Presidency

The next speaker in this very fast-paced ICA 2018 session is Jayson Harsin, whose interest is in the emergence of post-truth or emo-truth in the context of the Trump Presidency. Post-truth appeals to emotion and personal belief rather than facts; this is a periodising term that refers to a widespread culture of distrust in an era of channel fragmentation and the emergence of micro-truthtellers who dine out on such emotional appeals.

This is powerfully connected to cynicism and distrust in a new, hypercapitalist, neo-liberal environment and builds on aggressive, strategic, political communication apparatuses. Distrust is now at a record high, in part because active trust in institutions has declined so much in recent years. This is driven in part also by the growing level of incivility in political discourse: there is an outrage industry that is largely male-dominated and undermines trust in existing political institutions.

This is also caught up in the rise of reality TV: a scripted, highly edited form of content that nonetheless appeals to a higher level of truthfulness by including episodes of raw unpredictability – and the raw, unpredictable elements of the Trump Presidency and other populist campaigns offer a very similar appeal, compared to the conventional, carefully controlled image management of the Obama White House.

For Trump this manifests in body language, photo curation, all-caps tweeting, the naming and slurring of opponents, and controversial topic selection; he presents fundamentally differently from ‘conventional’ political leaders.