There are still good days for facts.
Or even: there are still truths.
Or even in the absolute singular: There is still truth.
This is the news from the United States this week, and it's a spectacular news. After all, in Donald Trump's America, we hardly thought such a sentence was possible, because three years ago this president brought a different understanding of politics, society and reality to Washington.
But now we are experiencing a week in which an indictment, a report and a revelation have been presented - and quite clearly there are three times what is true. And all three documents play a role.
In the Trump era, these days of clarity and clarity seemed impossible.
Trump's wisdom: It's about winning, not ethics
Donald Trump had learned at a young age, as a son and as a real estate entrepreneur, first from his father and then from his lawyer Roy Cohn, that a man who wanted to be successful had to strike back always and invariably: "ten times harder than you were hit", Cohn had told him that. That's why Trump had once sued his business rivals, so he had denounced the wives he wanted to leave, and over the years he has internalized what he now declares to be his wisdom: life is about winning, not ethical standards.
And what does truth mean?
Truth is only a weapon in the daily struggle for survival.
Washington, DC has never been a squishy city. Intrigues have been part of the political game for centuries, and lies also, for power has always been almost as important as truth and sometimes more important. Yet, after all, before Trump, the concept of truth existed as America's democracy worked: Congress controlled the president and all the powerful in the country, since a lie under oath before Congress was a serious crime. The courts controlled the policy; and the media looked closely, corrected themselves when they made mistakes, and otherwise, mostly, was taken seriously.
Then Trump came, and the truth went.
Donald Trump sensed that the format of the one-sided, heated talk radio and radically biased websites had started something great, and he perfected it: with Trump, the concept of alternative facts, as it's called in his White House, came to the capital. The time when scientific data was still accepted as much as minutes of conversation or even facts testified by millions of people, the time when there was a common truth and then, of course, different opinions, was over when Trump took office.
And, as he sees it as successful, he still does what he learned in New York. He attacks, always.
So the Democrats say he violated the law and put forth their evidence - and Trump says, "The Democrats want to make a coup, they're criminals." And: "The media help them and are the enemies of the people." The Democrats are stubborn; So he talks about "lynching" and "witch hunt". The Democrats are precise in their charges; That's why he says, "You're crazy, hysterical."
He wants to redirect attention, turn the perception. His party helps him and says there is no evidence, even though she has just seen the evidence. She says that Ukraine intervened in the 2016 US elections, even though witnesses have just testified that Vladimir Putin's intelligence agencies had invented this theory to relieve Russia and burden Ukraine's war veterans.
