We old hands cant stop Trump. This is a job for the young | Marina Hyde

I wish it were otherwise, but there is something very dating about the mere act of engaging with Trumps lies, like watching a respected comedian misfire with an out-of-touch bit about Snapchat. To watch a pundit even begin to pick apart that birther non-apology is to watch a human being age 10 years on screen in the time it takes to get to Donald J Trump is a closer. You might as well have a Socratic debate with a fart.

A decade or so ago, I remember reading a statistic about how pretty much everyone under a certain cut-off age instinctively rang doorbells with their thumb raised on games consoles and mobile phones and whatnot while pretty much everyone over the age still used an index finger. I detect something of that quaint chasm now when I watch even political idols rebutting Trump.

The brilliant David Simon, creator of The Wire, on Thursday seemed to be agreeing with the author Jeff Pearlman that the downsizing of journalism was responsible for terrible coverage of the election. You can hire 22-year-olds to write, Pearlman lamented, but can they report? Or think about what they are reporting or not reporting, added Simon, and why. I know what they mean. But with the greatest of respect to these viewpoints, I cant help feeling that a good portion of our best hope for countering Trumpvision lies in the hands of that younger (to me) generation, who reflexively seem to understand what in the name of insanity is happening now far better than their elders, and increasingly seem more likely to find a way of countering it.

Youth isnt always wasted on the young, and even the most self-regarding old hands must concede that Trump has almost all of them looking flatfooted. Please think fondly of that exchange in the Simpsons, where a hack says to Bart after some impudence: Im an investigative reporter whos on the roada lot, and uh, I must say that in my day, we didnt talk to our elders like that. Well, replies Bart, this is my day,andwe do.

Perhaps truth in politics will have some of its status restored in the event of a Hillary Clinton win. Perhaps truth in politics will return ironically, like dad jeans or <a href=”https://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/apr/04/rick-astley-live-review” title=”” data-link-name=”in” body link” class=”u-underline”>Rick Astley. Whether truth will ever be the market leader again, however, seems less certain with every hour of this mesmerically modern US presidential campaign (just as it did, in a smaller and even more post-imperial kinda way, during the Brexit referendum).

Then again, perhaps anxiety about the absence of truth is far older than we neophytes care to imagine, there being precisely nothing new under the sun. If truth be not fled with Astraea, remarked Jonathan Swift all the way back in 1711, she is certainly as hidden as the source of the Nile itself, and can be found only in Utopia. Perhaps she can once again be found in the 24-hour political news cycle though at present, you certainly wouldnt rule it in.