Portal de Turismo de Castilla y León

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January 26, 2026

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"The post-truth era can, of course, be understood as the era of disinformation, but the novelty of what is happening to us has more to do with a perverted exercise of citizen judgment and with our inability to discern truth from falsehood."

The day after Trump's first presidential inauguration, his press secretary claimed the event had drawn the largest audience in history. When defending what was demonstrably false, a White House advisor dismissed it as "alternative facts." In this lucid and insightful essay, Máriam Martínez-Bascuñán argues that this marked the end of one era in politics and the beginning of another. She sheds light on this new paradigm, drawing on the prescient wisdom of Hannah Arendt. The problem with the emergence of alternative facts, post-truths, and pre-lies is not that they eliminate truth—after all, truth is not an absolute value in politics—but rather that they undermine the common ground that, for some time now, had allowed for democratic deliberation.

Máriam Martínez-Bascuñán is a professor of Political Science at the Autonomous University of Madrid and a specialist in political theory and feminist thought. She completed her studies in Political Science and Law at the Paris Institute of Political Studies and has been a visiting researcher at the University of Chicago and Columbia University. She has written numerous academic articles in journals such as the Journal of World Political Science, REIS, Isegoría, and REPC, among others, and co-authored Populisms (Alianza) with Fernando Vallespín. She was the Opinion Editor of the newspaper El País from 2018 to 2020 under the editorship of Soledad Gallego Díaz. She is currently a columnist and editorial writer for the same newspaper.