Psychedelic mendacity is a great phrase.
I'll say it again, all politicians lie and are cynical and we were already living in a post-truth world where people allowed themselves a certain latitude to pick the facts they preferred... and yet even in this world and with those provisos, Trump launched an all out full frontal assault on truth, total war on the concept of truth and the quaint idea that what you say should have some relationship to the world it purports to describe - an attack that was unprecedented in its ambition, its scale and savagery. The aim to completely eradicate truth and anything like it, to utterly erase the idea itself from the world and then from memory. To bury it so deep it could never be found again. To sow salt into the ground where it lay. To end it.
And they came so close, but maybe, just maybe there are a few tiny bits of truth left that can grow back and matter once again. I dunno, I doubt it, but with Trump in power it had less than no chance.
And with truth gone everything loses its value. I was suffocating in that world, going mad with frustration. Now, maybe just maybe there is the hint of a thread to lead us from the labyrinth...