I’d only just made my peace with living in the age of post-truth and now we’ve moved on to Alternative Facts. 2017 is going to take a toll on my millennial, emoji-loving self. (This is not up for debate.)

Post-truths, that wondrous term where “the specified concept has become unimportant or irrelevant”, require a certain level of verbal and logical finesse. For instance, the post-truth response to “What is being done to check the rise in violence against Dalits?” is “HDU! WHY DID YOU HAVE TO MENTION THEY WERE DALITS? WHY ARE YOU HELL BENT ON DIVIDING THE NATION? WE ARE ALL INDIAN NO? JAI HIND!” In the wake of that, it’s hard to resist going home to paint a mural of the country using one’s own iodine-deficient blood.

Conversely, alternate facts are also easier to provide.

Alternative facts are not lies per se. And yes, it’s “alternative”, and not “alternate” as The New Yorker writes it. Bless The New Yorker for attempting grammatical accuracy when faced with the Trump administration, but the fact of the matter is that Kellyanne Conway specifically said “alternative fact”. So we’ll just go with that, shall we?

So alternative facts are, simply put, not truths. And there’s the rub. Observe. White House press secretary Sean Spicer told the press that President Donald Trump’s inauguration was “the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration — period — both in person and around the globe.”

Anyone at the actual inauguration, or with access to a television, or on the internet may find this…not entirely accurate.

A combination of photos taken at the National Mall shows the crowds attending the inauguration ceremonies to swear in U.S. President Donald Trump at 12:01pm (L) on January 20, 2017 and President Barack Obama sometime between 12:07pm and 12:26pm on January 20, 2009, in Washington, U.S., REUTERS/Lucas Jackson (L), Stelios Varias/File Photo

When confronted with this visual ‘aid’, Spicer admirably doubled down, claiming the “new” floor covering gave the impression of empty space. Of course, this was also not true. The Washington Post went on to award him “Four Pinocchios” for his calm in the face of scorched trousers.

The current United States administration has made the peddling of flimflammery their official policy. You have to respect that, no flip-flopping there.

In an interview on NBC‘s Meet the Press, Chuck Todd pressed Trump senior adviser Kellyanne Conway on Spicer’s prevarications and he was told, “You’re saying it’s a falsehood. And they’re giving — Sean Spicer, our press secretary — gave alternative facts.”

Todd, new to the concept, continued to pull at the thread, asking why someone would lie, and so poorly at that. “Think about what you just said to your viewers. That’s why we feel compelled to go out and clear the air and put alternative facts out there,” said Conway.

America just got Jessuped.

Where post-truths allow for a certain level of engagement, alternative fact does not. Because where do you even begin? The New York Times is attempting a valiant stab at it, fact checking every statement as they’re made, but those tweets are getting fewer and further apart.

Trump signed an executive order on Friday that bans all immigrants and visa holders from seven predominantly Muslim countries from entering the US for 90 days. It also slashed the US’s refugee quota to less than half of that set by former-President Obama and barred all refugees from countries that aren’t specifically approved by the US government. This spawned a massive outcry over the order and protests at around ten airports. The White House response to this was to declare the order a “success” and Trump took to Twitter as one does.

A Delta Airlines glitch on Sunday evening did ground flights at 170 airports, but the Federal Aviation Administration said the outages didn’t affect international flights. No one has been able to confirm where the number 325,000 came from. From contesting the size of the inauguration and the weather, Trump supporters have progressed to asserting that refugees do not go through an “extreme vetting” when entering the US. As The Washington Post points out, this is far from true.

Here in India, we can gaze fondly at how Trumpkins slowly get comfortable with trumpeting not-truths as truth. We’ve been dealing with alternative facts here for some time now. Our very own Hamilton Burger, Ujjwal Nikam rhetorically weaponised biryani. As did Narendra Modi during his time as Chief Minister (who knew the might of the humble biryani). And who could forget our lost genetic splicing knowledge, “There must have been some plastic surgeon at that time who got an elephant’s head on the body of a human being and began the practice of plastic surgery.” Oh and remember Kapil Sibal’s zero loss spiel on the 2G scam?

Alternate facts are our national pastime as anyone with a WhatsApp account knows. Mass sexual assaults during New Year’s revelry? “Did not happen.” Was demonetisation about unearthing pots of black money hidden under mattresses across the country? No, fool, it was about a cashless economy all along. Sorry, it was about plugging terror financing. No wait, it was to check real estate prices. Heck, we’ve made that ‘fact’ curriculum now — the Rajasthan Board of Secondary Education plans to include a chapter on demonetisation and cashless economy. I think the only fact we can agree on at this point is that currency was recalled. 

And let us not forget the time the Press Information Bureau of the Ministry of Information & Broadcasting had to issue an official statement “regretting the ‘inconvenience caused’ by the ‘merging of two pictures’” of Modi gazing at an aerial view of flood-stricken Tamil Nadu.

Of course, we had the best instructors. All those years of Hindi-Russi and Hindi-Chini bhai-bhai weren’t for naught. Observe how the picture was altered again and again after each person fell out of favour with Stalin. Asif and Mudasir have nothing on this.

Heck, Mao was so petty he had people removed from pictures of his own funeral!

Dude had made his peace with leaving gaps in the lineup just to have the Gang of Four alternate-facted in 1976.

Trump has a long way to go before he learns it isn’t the size of your fact, it’s how you use it.