Donald Trump and Post-Truth Politics: An Argumentative Perspective

In 2016, The Oxford English Dictionary declared “Post-Truth” the Word of the Year. Many debates in the public sphere have centered around the concept of “Post-Truth” and how it might affect political discourse in the present and near future. It is argued by many that “post-truth” politics was a direct cause of the election of President Donald Trump in 2016. According to this argument, people who voted for Trump did so for irrational, emotional reasons, and were not influenced by the proven factual falsity of many of his statements, as they should have been. I will analyze Donald Trump’s inauguration speech, as well as several of his campaign speeches, from the perspective of argumentation theory (Walton 2006, 2007) in order to decide whether the reasons Donald Trump offered to the electorate were ‘rational’ or not, and I will claim that, in spite of the role ‘fake news’ and false statements played in the outcome of the campaign, Trump’s voters had valid reasons to vote for him, reasons that cannot be easily dismissed as irrational.