The sickness in America is that Trump’s supporters don’t know they have been duped

There is a sickness in the American mind, a willful forgetting of what is true and what is not. It did not begin yesterday, nor with the last election, but it has found its most potent vessel in the former president, a man who treats truth as a negotiable commodity.

An apocryphal quote often attributed to Mark Twain says, “It’s easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled.”

The stubborn fact is that a great many of his supporters do not know they have been sold a bill of goods. To point this out is not condescension; it is a diagnosis of a national malady.

For too long, major news channels and publications trembled at the word “lie,” dressing falsehood in the gentler garb of “misstatement” or “unfounded claim.”

This was a failure of nerve. When a man repeats a thing 30,000 times after it has been disproved, the correct word is not elusive.

The shift came slowly, but it came: networks cutting away to correct a president in real time, newspapers finally calling a spade a spade. The dam broke not out of bias, but out of sheer exhaustion with the flood.

The crisis of truth is older than this. Studies show Americans increasingly inhabit separate planets of fact. Roughly seven in ten Republicans initially dismissed Joe Biden’s victory as illegitimate, not based on evidence, but on allegiance.

Conspiracy theories bloom in this soil, from pandemics plotted in shadows to elections stolen in broad daylight. We are a nation that struggles to separate fact from feeling; nearly a quarter of us cannot reliably identify a simple factual statement as such when presented with it.

We praise a man for solving a crisis he himself manufactured, as if applauding an arsonist for putting out his own fire.

Look at the record, not the rally. The administration’s credibility is strained, tested by events like the killing of Alex Jeffrey Pretti and the opaque handling of consequential cases.

Allies are alienated with tariffs imposed on a whim, turning trade into theater. Promises to shrink spending have exploded into larger deficits.

Wars are extended, not ended. The base is told one thing, while the policy machine often churns in the opposite direction. Even some of his most vocal supporters, from podcasters to comedians, now voice a confused betrayal, saying, “I voted for none of this.”

It is a sad state of affairs, long in the making. We no longer share a common base of facts, only competing narratives that soothe our prejudices.

The citizen is left to navigate a wilderness of spin, where every institution is suspect except the one that tells them what they wish to hear. The president governs as if spectacle is substance, as if commanding the hourly news cycle is the same as securing the long-term good.

But here is a hopeful truth: voters are not fools forever. The slogans grow stale. The gimmicks wear thin.

You cannot pay the rent with fake gold or heat a home with hot air. The poll numbers among key constituencies, once hopeful for change, are beginning to cool. The performance, however loud, cannot forever mask a lack of durable results.

The task now is not to mock those who were misled, but to rebuild a common ground of verifiable reality.

It is to insist, with civility and with evidence, that facts are not partisan possessions. They are the foundation upon which a republic must stand, or it will surely fall.

The alternative is a nation babbling in tongues, shouting past each other from inside separate cages of belief, while the real work of the country goes undone.