THE world has exhaled a collective sigh of relief. Relief that the nightmare of Trumpism was subsumed beneath a beautiful blue sea of Democratic votes. A sea of ethnic diversity, mutual respect, hope, and grace. Qualities absent from a White House morally barren since January 2017.

President Trump remains in denial. Bitter, angry, and litigious. Lashing out with one baseless claim after another. He tweeted in capital letters “I won this election, by a lot” and claimed it “was stolen” from him. A latter-day Nero issuing edicts. In Trumpland you make your own truth. You double down on it and instruct sycophants to repeat it.

The facts were simple: the election was won fair and square by President-Elect Joe Biden with a record-breaking 75 million votes. And with the first ever female, first black and first South Asian vice president-elect Kamala Harris. Amazing history in the making for women and people of colour stateside.

Trump famously doesn’t like reading. If he did, he would surely misunderstand the wisdom of Dylan Thomas: “Do not go gently into that good night; Rage, rage against the dying of the light”. The poem’s message is to embrace all of the good and wonderful things in life while you can. Not to rage against your country’s sacred democratic institutions because you’re a sore loser.

Trump will continue to pursue his frivolous court actions in Pennsylvania and elsewhere. Lawsuits in Georgia, Michigan, Arizona and Nevada have already been dismissed or refused because of the paucity of evidence for claims of widespread election fraud. Trump’s team are indulging the President in his fantasy world as they chase rainbows.

For me the decline and fall of Donald Trump’s reign in the Republic marks a pivotal turning point in the fate of politicians who tell lies as easily as breathing. What you say and do should matter. How you treat fellow human beings matters. But it hasn’t in the UK or USA for some time now.

Watching US election coverage – which ran over the whole of last week – was remarkable. News anchors at the CNN television network repeatedly called out Trump’s claims of massive election fraud as unsubstantiated lies. No ifs or buts. Baseless lies said CNN.

Back in the UK, when political nonsense is trotted out many (but not all) of our broadcasters simply present patent nonsense as “one side of the argument”. Even when assertions are self-evident monstrous lies.

Are we witnessing the beginning of the end of post-truth politics?

The Oxford English dictionary defines post-truth politics as the “public burial of ‘objective facts’ by an avalanche of media appeals to emotion and personal belief”. In Germany the term is known as “postfaktisch” (post-factual).

Trump’s fiction has been with him all his life. When he became President-Elect – and lost the popular vote to Hilary Clinton – he claimed five million votes for her were illegal votes from unauthorised immigrants. He even set up an inquiry that fizzled into nothingness. It was a shameless lie.

We all saw his inauguration in January 2017 where he claimed to have the biggest crowd in American presidential history. The Whitehouse photographs were cropped to cut out the massive empty spaces, and we all saw the gaps. Yet he continued to lie.

The demonisation of people because of the colour of their skin or where they come from was the hallmark of the Trump presidency. Putting immigrant children in cages and separating them from their parents. The nightmare went on and on.

How different have we been in the UK? The Johnson government seized power on the same divisive lies and hatred of Europeans, immigrants and asylum seekers. Lies of £350 million extra for the NHS on the side of the infamous Vote Leave battlebus.

The pandemic has seen one post-truth falsehood after another in the UK. Cronyism and no transparency in the doling out of billions of tax payers pounds in Covid-19 contracts that have never been put out to competitive tender.

Johnson himself reportedly made a successful career in fake, racist and often abusive journalism. While America has denied Trump a second term in the Oval Office, the UK still has its incompetent government of mini-Trumps. Now, they are no longer in vogue.

Over the weekend Johnson sent a congratulatory tweet to Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. Former Obama press aide Tommy Vietor responded to Johnson’s message by calling him a “shapeshifting creep” and said: “We will never forget your racist comments about Barack Obama and slavish devotion to Trump.”

President-Elect Biden is no fan of Johnson. He hasn’t forgiven him for his remarks during the Brexit referendum, when he wrote President Obama’s decision to remove a bust of Churchill from the Oval Office was a “symbol of the part-Kenyan president’s ancestral dislike of the British empire”.

The days of the UK’s Trumpists are looking numbered.