On January 21, 2017, President Donald Trump's then'press secretary, Sean Spicer, claimed that Trump had drawn the largest audience to ever witness a presidential inauguration. Photographs clearly showed that the assertion was false; Trump's predecessor, Barack Obama, had drawn a much larger crowd at his first inauguration. But it didn't matter. In one sense, Spicer's lie was trivial. But in another sense, it mattered quite a lot, because it was a lie about a demonstrable fact. Kellyanne Conway, then a counselor to Trump, memorably defended Spicer by claiming that he was offering 'alternative facts,' treating observable reality like hot wax, to be molded at will. Fast-forward eight years. Trump is once again president. Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor in chief of The Atlantic, was mistakenly included on a private group chat'via Signal, a nongovernmental messaging app'in which Trump-administration officials discussed a planned bombing campaign in Yemen. Goldberg reported on the reckless...
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