Nietzsche, Trump, and the social practices of valuing truth

While Nietzsche offers resources for thinking about the post-truth politics of Donald Trump, this is not because Nietzsche gives up on truth but because he is prescient in realizing what is at stake in our esteem for it. Nietzsche argues that the specifically unconditional value we attribute to truth raises the spectre of nihilism. Trump is a harbinger of this nihilism because he flaunts our shared social practices of valuing truth. While Nietzsche's accounts of truth and objectivity appear to make room for Trump, Nietzsche also praises epistemic virtues—honesty, courage, curiosity, and responsibility—that Trump surely fails to express.