Fox News’ Lara Trump boasted on the air last week that her father-in-law’s presidency is “the most transparent” in American history. The comments generated some predictable pushback, but they were hardly unfamiliar.
A few days later, Tammy Bruce, the State Department’s chief spokesperson, similarly boasted about the incumbent president’s “famous transparency.” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt has, on multiple occasions, told the public that Trump is “the most transparent and accessible president in history.”
While misplaced praise for Trump is certainly the norm in Republican circles, this is an unusually silly claim. Consider this report from The Washington Post, published a couple of weeks ago:
Across President Donald Trump’s administration, a creeping culture of secrecy is overtaking personnel and budget decisions, casual social interactions, and everything in between, according to interviews with more than 40 employees across two dozen agencies, most of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid reprisals. No one wants to put anything in writing anymore, federal workers said: Meetings are conducted in-person behind closed doors, even on anodyne topics. Workers prefer to talk outdoors, as long as the weather cooperates. And communication among colleagues — whether work-related or personal — has increasingly shifted to the encrypted messaging app Signal, with messages set to auto-delete.
This came on the heels of the White House’s decision to purge online transcripts of the president’s public remarks, making it more difficult for the public to learn what, exactly, Trump has said.
When the president’s allies talk about his transparency, they tend to point to the frequency with which he communicates with the public and his willingness to field questions from reporters. On the surface, there’s a kernel of truth to that: Those wanting to know what’s on Trump’s mind generally don’t have to wait too long between his online tantrums and routine rants.
But having an accessible president and having a transparent White House are not the same thing. Trump has been needlessly secretive about his tax returns. And his medical records. And his visitor logs. And his donors. And his customers. And even his undisclosed interactions with Russia’s Vladimir Putin. If we’re going to talk about Trump’s “famous transparency,” the only fair conclusion is that the president is famous for not caring at all about transparency.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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