On governing from an alternative reality

For many years, Harry Litman contributed legal commentary to the Los Angeles Times. He had the biography for the job, as a federal prosecutor, a former Deputy Assistant Attorney General during the Clinton administration, and a career in significant litigation thereafter. 

When LAT owner Patrick Soon-Shiong indicated he was bending the knee to Donald Trump, Litman was part of the exodus of respected journalists from the paper, taking his column to a well read Substack. 

Recently, he believes he is seeing the Trump administration retreating to cloud cuckoo land. Think Hegseth, Noem, RFK Jr. and the Orange Daddy himsel. A regime of lies now operates outside consensus reality -- as if a bunch of self-satisfied, out of touch, criminal addicts of power were running the show. I guess they are.

Says Litman: 

This isn’t lying in the usual political sense. It is governing from an alternate reality—one in which legal authority, factual accuracy, and empirical verification are dispensable trifles.

And that is what provokes the shift in reaction among commentators. They are no longer challenging claims as much as expressing bewilderment at the absence of any shared factual universe.

The problem, of course, is that a democracy requires such a universe. Trump has always strained against that baseline, but now he and his Administration increasingly operate in a space where the laws of logic bend and the lines never cross. The rest of us—courts, Congress, journalists, citizens—are left trying to stitch reality back together in a world where the government no longer recognizes it.

How might those of us living in the reality-based community respond:  

The only workable response begins with declining to play by the rules of their distant planet. First, call out the move—not just the mistake. These are not ordinary falsehoods. They are claims wholly untethered from evidence, law, or logic, and the point is to overwhelm, not persuade. Institutions should say plainly when a statement has no factual substrate at all.

Second, refuse to litigate the fabricated premise. Wormhole politics depends on forcing opponents to disprove fantasies—“prove Halligan isn’t authorized,” “prove the survivors weren’t traffickers,” “prove the bomber isn’t morally distinct.” The proper move is to reject the burden-shift and insist that the Administration supply actual evidence before the claim enters serious discourse. 

Holding a government to account is work enough without having to chase its claims across the universe to an entirely different planet. 

The Trump regime uses every power it has seized to prevent us from being able to escape from their lies and their fantasy world. Resistance is refusing to go there, even if seeing the truth is brutal.