I appreciate your reply, Bill, because my interest in diverse opinions is sincere.
Unless the White House press releases on their webpages, news conferences videos, and Trump’s live and recorded statements are all forged/corrupted/A.I.-generated, I would say that much of the “real situation” can be known.
I think our sources of information are more voluminous and easily accessible than ever before in history. Indeed, with everything from CSPAN to 24/7 news networks, we have more “access” to government officials and their statements than ever before. I would agree that there is much stated that is “less than truth” across the spectrum—whether it be Democrat efforts to prevent the public from knowing the truth of Biden’s decline or Trumps rapid-fire self-contradictions (which by definition must be “less than truth”) and pathological lying. (Fortunately, Trump’s cognitive decline has been fully public and NOT covered up through countless campaign appearances and day-to-day utterances. I found it interesting to read some medical specialist analyze the behaviors of both Biden and Trump and they agreed that Biden’s most blatant lapses were primarily physical traits/incidents while Trump’s were cognitive. I am not a professional so I am unqualified to resolve the question with finality but I certainly came to the conclusion that neither was/is cognitively qualified for the office. That said, I do get the impression that Trump is getting more rest as President than he got as a campaigner because he is word-salad nonsense and dying-off-into-oblivious sentences are less common than last fall.)
When people tell me that whatever news they don’t like is “fake news”, I consider it a convenient way to IGNORE the truth. (Besides, commentary is not news—even if it is broadcast on a 24/7 news network.) Indeed, this reminds me of my past experience within the Young Earth Creationist community. Contrary evidence was usually simply ignored or denied. One of the examples which brought things to a fork in the road for me was when I would hear Duane Gish admit to an audience during a Q&A that his popular bombardier beetle example had been proven wrong—and he promised to remove it from future printings of his books—but a few weeks later at another conference he would repeat the falsehood anyway. (And when I checked later printings of his books, the example was still there.) So what I originally attributed to ignorance I eventually had to attribute to deceit and gaslighting his audience.
So I have lost my patience with the “post-truth” rationalizing nowadays that “It is impossible for us to really know what is really happening and what is true.” Yes, I will probably never know what happened in closed meetings of cabinet officials or what exactly was said in phone calls with the Kremlin. But when I listen to presidential addresses and press conferences, I do believe that what I am hearing is most likely what they actually said. And that is enough to scare me.
And I say that as someone who for most of my life called myself a Republican (and a political conservative.) Now I want nothing to do with either term, in part because the labels are stoked in ambiguity and confusion.
I hope you are right. But what I see happening currently is a fundamental erosion of rule of law and Constitutional fundamentals unlike any other era. I would classify the present crisis as every bit as dangerous to the nation as the Civil War.