With the administration of President Donald Trump we are witness to a phenomenon in which the quantity of falsehoods becomes a quality of its own - a quality of danger to the structure of democracy.
The Trump regime is outdoing all the others that came before in its attack on truth itself. A complete list of the lies and the facts that undo them would be longer than this space allows. Let's examine just one.
The immigrants from seven Muslim majority countries were to be banned from US entry on the ground that people from those countries posed a threat of terrorism.
The ban was temporarily overturned by US District Court Judge James Robart on grounds of discrimination. On appeal to the Ninth District Appeals Court, the ban was again blocked when the appeals court held that "the government has pointed to no evidence ... that any alien from any of the countries named in the order has perpetrated a terrorist attack in the United States".
The disrespect for the co-equal nature of the American system of government implicit in Trump's tweeting about Judge Robart as a "so-called judge", and threatening the Appeals Court as having responsibility for any attack on the US, ought to be demonstration enough of a man with a faulty understanding of Constitutional requirements and restraints.
While the ban may make its way to the Supreme Court, the echo chamber of right-wing Trump supporters are busy trying to drum up the evidence to support that ban.
His spin meistress, Kellyanne Conway, inventor of the phrase "alternative facts" to describe Trump's lies, also invented a massacre in Bowling Green, Kentucky, to provide substance for the ban.
Right-wing fake news outlets like the National Examiner cited reports from thoroughly debunked sources that 72 immigrants from the seven banned countries had been convicted of terrorist attacks in the US. Included among those "terrorism" convictions were identity theft, motor vehicle violations, making false statements and fraud.
Trump himself made the claim that there were 70 instances of under-reporting by mainstream media of terrorist attacks by people from his target countries. The New York Times quickly dispelled this myth, but no one can explain the fascination with the number "7" that keeps reappearing in all this falsity.
What is emerging is a continuing attempt to delegitimise the press, which Sean Spicer, Trump's press person, calls "the opposition party".
Congressman Lamar Smith, Republican of Texas, suggests that, in the face of the media's "failures", the only reliable source for truth is the president.
The attack on the press and co-equal branches of government are earmarks of an authoritarian government which must be resisted. History shows that this sort of power-grabbing attack on the structural pillars of democracy doesn't end well.
In the 1970s, during the height of the Vietnam War and the paranoia of the Nixon administration, a cartoonist, Walt Kelly, put words to his everyman character Pogo Possum that captured the national divisiveness being amplified by the administration.
Pogo said: "We have met the enemy and he is us."
■Jay Kuten is an American-trained forensic psychiatrist who emigrated to New Zealand for the fly fishing. He spent 40 years comforting the afflicted and intends to spend the rest afflicting the comfortable
