INDIANAPOLIS Theres an old standby rejoinder that debaters use to rebuff outlandish claims:

Youre entitled to your own opinion, but youre not entitled to your own facts.

Maybe.

Maybe not.

Anyone tracking social media realizes that Americans dont even agree on facts these days. President Donald Trumps campaign to overturn the 2020 presidential election results is a case in point.

To most Americans, the presidents court battles to decertify ballots and disenfranchise voters are exercises in a dangerous kind of absurdity. They see that, in state after state and court after court, Trumps claims of voter fraud and other forms of election malfeasance either have been tossed out or flat dismissed, often in withering, even contemptuous terms.

They hear the president claim that he has been wronged but see him produce nothing that resembles evidence facts indicating that fraud occurred and they conclude that he is lying.

They are the majority.

But there is a substantial minority of Americans who dont see things that way. They argue, in their own network and now on their own social media platform, that hundreds of thousands of votes either have been manufactured (if they were for Democrat Joe Biden) or thrown away (if they were for Trump.)

These are supposed to be facts things that should be verifiable.

But the verification in the hothouse world that Donald Trumps supporters inhabit is the repeated assertion of the claim. A fact becomes a fact simply because it is said again and again and again.

And not because its truth or accuracy can be established by any sort of objective means.

This might be amusing if the stakes werent so high.

Im not talking about whether the Biden presidency is delegitimized, undercut or opposed. Presidencies come and go. Some succeed. Others fail.

That is the nature of things.

Nor am I speaking now about President Trumps attacks on American institutions the sovereignty of the courts, the oversight responsibilities of the legislative branch, etc. (All of these, by the way, the president took an oath to defend.)

Those are serious matters. The presidents assaults on the bulwarks of a government established by a free people intent on ruling themselves will have lasting consequences and recovery efforts will require years possibly even decades before the damage is undone.

But recovery is possible.

That may not be the case with the war Donald Trump now wages.

In that conflict, the premise animating the American revolution is the enemy, the thing the president seeks to destroy.

The revolution that made us a country was a product of the Enlightenment. The American Enlightenment thinkers many of whom declared independence from Britain and drafted the Constitution under which we still govern ourselves placed their faith in reason. They believed that people who had access to facts would arrive at positions that made sense.

That were fair.

That were just.

The author of the Declaration of Independence, not surprisingly, gave voice most memorably to this creed.

[T]his institution will be based on the illimitable freedom of the human mind. for here we are not afraid to follow truth wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate any error so long as reason is left free to combat it, Thomas Jefferson wrote in a letter to English historian William Roscoe.

But Jeffersons faith in freedom and American deals was based on a conviction that facts matter.

That truth is something that can be tested and verified.

That is the faith that Donald Trump and his followers now challenge.

For them, the truth is a malleable commodity, easily shaped and molded to meet the needs of the moment.

And facts?

Well, they are not much different than fiction.

If Trump is right about this, then Jefferson and the other founders of this nation were wrong. Reason is powerless and cannot prevail when facts do not matter.

These days, Donald Trump spends much of his time focusing on filing lawsuits and going to court.

Among the many things hes putting on trial is the idea of America itself.

John Krull is director of Franklin Colleges Pulliam School of Journalism and publisher of TheStatehouseFile.com, a news website powered by Franklin College journalism students.

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Trump's war with America itself | Opinion | washtimesherald.com - Washington Times Herald