“Now that the referendum is over, Johnson and others have backtracked, and the campaign has rebranded itself the ‘Change Britain’ movement and promised to redirect EU funds to other areas instead”

the Iraq War was launched in 2003 under false pretenses. Intelligence reports had not established that there were weapons of mass destruction in the country, yet British Prime Minister Tony Blair dutifully followed US President George W. Bush in ordering his military to invade. The consequences of that decision are still emerging.

If our leaders can be so willfully wrong about such consequential matters, how can we believe anything they tell us? This question has opened the door for a new, more overt truthiness, espoused by the likes of Trump, who seems to introduce freshly invented “facts” on a daily basis. Trump’s surrogates, for their part, use television appearances and social media to restate the falsehoods, seemingly operating under the principle that if you repeat something often enough, it will become true.

And many voters seem willing to go along for the ride. When 40 leading Republican foreign policymakers and national-security experts signed a letter expressing their opposition to Trump, whom they fear would be “the most reckless president in American history,” their concerns were largely disregarded. Trump’s response – that those leaders are the ones who made the world “such a dangerous place” – sounds just plausible enough to justify ignoring their warning. Even outright lies spoken in a nationally broadcast