There was a moment in the 2016 presidential campaign that, in retrospect, sounds less like campaign chatter than something a post-modern French philosopher might have slipped into American politics.

On CNN, Newt Gingrich was pressed about Donald Trump's claim that crime was on the rise. The numbers told a different story. The FBI had been keeping score for years, and by their tally, crime--in the broad sense--was down.

Gingrich didn't bother to wrestle with the data. He stepped around it.

"The average American," he said, "does not think crime is down." And then, almost offhand: "As a political candidate, I'll go with how people feel, and I'll let you go with the theoreticians."

You could spend a semester in a philosophy department and not get much beyond that.

What Gingrich described--without bothering to dress it up--is the idea that what people experience as true can outweigh what is demonstrably true. Facts don't get the final say.

That's a long way from the Enlightenment faith most of us were raised on--the notion that evidence accumulates, reason prevails, and public debate, however unruly, slowly bends away from superstition.

Gingrich's position is much closer to the territory mapped out by Jean Baudrillard, who argued that in modern life the representation of things can become more real than the things themselves, and Michel Foucault (technically a post-structuralist, not a post-modernist, but hey), who spent a career asking who gets to decide what truth is anyway.

You don't have to have read either of them to recognize the pattern. You just have to watch how we argue now.

Consider a recent round of commentary on Donald Trump, a CNN segment in which anchor Katie Hunt played a stitched-together montage of Trump talking about allies, military strength, and whether the United States needs anyone's help.

In one moment, he's asking for assistance. In the next, he's suggesting those same allies can't be relied upon. A beat later, he's insisting America doesn't need anybody at all.

The clip is meant to disorient. That's the trick of a montage: It compresses time, strips out the connective tissue, and leaves the seams exposed. By the end, you're left with one clear impression: contradiction shading into chaos.

That leap--from montage to diagnosis--is the story.

Contradiction becomes confusion. Confusion becomes incapacity. Before long, the 25th Amendment to the United States Constitution is hovering in the background. The feeling arrives first. The conclusion follows.

To be fair, Trump's rhetoric always invites this kind of response. He talks in loops and bursts--assertion, contradiction, then circling back--like a man thinking out loud and retracing his steps.

You can call it improvisational, or undisciplined, or strategically ambiguous, depending on your mood. But his supporters don't hear chaos. They recognize a familiar rhythm.

Allies should help--but they're unreliable. America is strong--but others should carry their weight. We can go it alone--but why should we have to?

It isn't tidy. It isn't doctrinal. But in its own way, it's consistent: a world-view that's skeptical of alliances, impatient with nuance and drawn to big claims delivered at full volume. Same words. Different experience.

At that point, Baudrillard stops sounding abstract and starts reading like a field guide.

In a media-saturated culture, he argued, representations don't simply reflect reality; they begin to replace it. The map overtakes the territory. The image becomes the event.

The montage doesn't just represent Trump's remarks; it creates a version of them that feels coherent even as it displays incoherence.

And once that version settles in, it's hard to shake loose, because it persuades by the way it feels. It lines up with what the viewer already suspects, and so it takes root as something like truth.

The same trick works in reverse. Counter-clips circulate, cut differently, leaving a different impression--strength, decisiveness, a leader who says what others won't. We end up not just disagreeing about what happened, but about what we saw.

If Baudrillard helps explain the environment, Foucault helps explain the struggle. Because what's really at stake isn't just perception. It's authority.

Who gets to define what counts as truth?

Is it the FBI statistics Gingrich waved away? The cable segment that stitches together a narrative? The lived experience of voters who feel less safe, no matter what the numbers say? Or the instincts of a candidate who claims to speak for them?

When Gingrich brushed off the "theoreticians," he was knocking down a whole class of authority--experts, institutions, the people whose job it is to measure and verify--and lifting up something much harder to argue with: perception.

Facts don't disappear after that. But they lose their ability to end the argument. If this were only happening on one side of the political divide, you might write it off as a partisan defect. It isn't.

Consider the way Democrats have talked about the economy under Joe Biden. By the usual measures--job growth, unemployment, wage gains in some corners--the numbers are strong enough to make a case.

Yet ask a lot of voters how the economy feels, and you'll hear things are tight, prices are stubborn, the ground doesn't feel as steady as the charts would have you believe.

The response is to point back at the data. Look at the trends. Look at the economists. Look at what the numbers say. One side says trust the feeling. The other says trust the numbers.

And both, at different moments, end up talking past an electorate trying--sometimes without much luck--to square the two.

Because if your grocery bill has climbed, the news that inflation has cooled doesn't land the way it's supposed to. The experience has done its work.

We'd prefer to believe that facts, properly presented, will carry the day, that if you line up the evidence clearly enough, people will adjust their views accordingly.

It's a comforting idea, especially for those of us who make a living arranging words and hoping they add up to something like clarity.

But that 2016 exchange suggests that persuasion doesn't begin with facts. It begins with a frame of feeling into which facts are either fitted or discarded. Once that frame is in place, it's remarkably durable.

None of this means truth is irrelevant, or that we should shrug our way into a kind of relativism where everything counts the same. That's a dead end.

It does mean that truth now has competition.

The montage that confirms what we already suspect. The statistic that validates what we've felt. The clip that, in a minute and 47 seconds, seems to settle what we think we know.

That 2016 exchange didn't create this condition. But it named it, almost in passing, before most of us had fully recognized what we were dealing with. "I'll go with how people feel." It sounded like a tactical move.

It turned out to be closer to a governing principle--not just for one party or one candidate, but for the way we argue about politics now.

The facts are still there. They just matter less than they ever have.

pmartin@adgnewsroom.com

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