The past few months have been full of drama, scandal and restless nights for conscientious Americans on both sides of the partisan divide; however, they’ve been missing one important thing, facts.

We live in a terrifying age of American politics. Truth and facts no longer seem to have an impact on most Americans. Instead, people place importance on outlandish narratives and ‘feel.’

A good example of this was the surge in the ‘birther’ conspirators, who claim that Barack Obama is not an American citizen following Republican candidate, now President, Donald Trump’s active support of the rumor in his campaign. Trump came to terms with the truth on Sept. 16 at a press conference in Florida, where he admitted, “Barack Obama was born in the United States. Period.” a fact that’s been true since 1961, and that Trump’s been questioning since 2011.

Perhaps even more troubling than Trump’s five-year-long campaign to delegitimize the then active American president, is the lie that he started immediately after accepting defeat. It actually happened in the same press conference. Trump said that Hillary Clinton and her 2008 campaign started the birther conspiracy.

Despite this being blatantly false, a poll released by Monmouth University found that a third of Florida citizens believed it.

There’s another thing that had been a pretty big part of the Trump campaign since its inception. A recent poll done by the Pew Research Center states that a whopping 66% of Trump supporters believe immigration to be a “very big problem” and, while our opinions may differ, most Americans believe that immigration is at least happening on a fairly large scale, but that isn’t true.

One of Trump’s campaign’s biggest claims, perhaps what won him the Republican Primary, is ‘the wall.’ Trump has plans to build a giant wall along our southern border to fix the immigration ‘problem.’ What most Americans seem not to know, is that we don’t have an immigration problem. We don’t have a net increase in illegal immigrants. The U.S. gains and loses about 300,000 immigrants every year, and that’s been steady since 2009.

Despite this, Trump did win the primary, and ‘the wall’ remains an important plank in his political platform. Despite Trump denouncing it, a third of Americans still believe in the birther conspiracy, and despite hundreds of liberal and conservative news sources claiming that it’s false, many Americans still believe that Clinton started the birther conspiracy.

No matter where you turn, American politics is dominated not by facts, but by confident lies, and the willing ignorance of American citizens. Our 45th president ran a campaign based, at best, on ignorance, and, at worst, lies. However fitting that Trump’s campaign mirrors the attitude and ignorance of the American public, it is unacceptable. Regardless of how you feel about his policy or attitude, the lies that carried the Trump campaign cannot become a theme in American politics, the next four years should be full of information, introspection, and most importantly: facts.