Falsifiable claims coexisted with advisers rejecting evidential standards outright

Evidence

After being sworn in as president on January 20, 2017, Trump offered a string of fresh falsehoods: that he had the biggest electoral victory since Reagan (he didn’t); that the crowd at his inauguration was the largest in US history (photographic evidence belies this and Washington, DC, Metro records show subway ridership down that day); that his speech at the CIA resulted in a standing ovation (he never asked the officers to sit). In early February, Trump claimed that the US murder rate was at a forty-seven-year high (when in fact the Uniform Crime Report from the FBI showed it to be at a near-historic low). The latter seems particularly egregious because it picks up on an earlier fib that Trump had told at the Republican convention, while searching for a way to push the idea that crime was on the rise. When challenged on this, Newt Gingrich (who was a surrogate for Trump at the time) had the following incredible on-camera exchange with CNN reporter Alisyn Camerota: Violent crime is down. — Lee McIntyre, Post-Truth, 25

Categorization

• XREF: The juxtaposition of Trump’s specific false claims (murder rate, crowd size) with Gingrich’s epistemic dismissal of ‘liberal statistics’ prefigures the chapter’s core thesis that post-truth is about feelings overriding facts. — connects to: Trump’s advisers explicitly claimed facts no longer exist in politics — Lee McIntyre, Post-Truth, 24; A claim’s falsity does not bar it from structuring thought — Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 179; Conspiracist claims that sever assertion from verifiability also destroy genuine skepticism — Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum, A Lot of People Are Saying: The New…, 264 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• A claim’s falsity does not bar it from structuring thought #expands (0.85) — Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 179
• Conspiracist claims that sever assertion from verifiability also destroy genuine skepticism #expands (0.82) — Russell Muirhead and Nancy L. Rosenblum, A Lot of People Are Saying, 264
• Unproven claims are slander or quackery regardless of disprovability. #contradicts (0.78) — Holm Gero Hümmler, Ulrike Schiesser, Fact and Prejudice, 766