The first and second Trump Administrations have provoked markedly different critical reactions. The shock of 2016 and its aftermath saw a wave of liberal anxiety about the fate of objective knowledge, not only in the United States but also in Britain, where the Brexit referendum that year had been won by a campaign that misrepresented key facts and figures. A rich lexicon soon arose to describe this epistemic breakdown. Oxford Dictionaries declared “post-truth” their 2016 word of the year; Merriam-Webster’s was “surreal.” The scourge of “fake news,” pumped out by online bots and Russian troll farms, suggested that the authority of professional journalism had been fatally damaged by the new hegemony of social media. And when presidential counselor Kellyanne Conway coined the phrase “alternative facts” a few days after Trump’s inauguration in early 2017, the mendacity of the incoming administration appeared to be all but official.…