Trump and the Republican party have utterly destroyed truth telling. You can't win any argument if your opponent denies the existence of truth and facts. Recently, someone responded to one of my comments when I made a joke that Hillary Clinton must have installed Paul Manafort in the Trump campaign.
I started to get replies that such a story had appeared on Breitbart therefore it must be true.
I was making a joke about the conspiratorial nature of Trump's alternate reality. Others saw the joke as true and build their belief systems around such nonsense.  If democracy depends on an informed citizenry, we have fallen much further than I thought.