Donald Trump’s discomfort with facts has become the stuff of legend. But given recent events, it’s worth dwelling on a specific part of the president’s rejection of reality — specifically, the war on data that he and his White House team have been waging with unnerving vigor.
The political combat is being fought on four fronts:
1. Hiding data: Throughout Trump’s second term, his administration has gone to outlandish lengths to keep important data away from the public. As The Washington Post reported in the spring, “The Trump administration is deleting taxpayer-funded data — information that Americans use to make sense of the world. In its absence, the president can paint the world as he pleases.” The same report added, “Curating reality is an old political game, but Trump’s sweeping statistical purges are part of a broader attempt to reinvent ‘truth.’”
It’s difficult to do a full accounting of what has gone missing, but we know the list includes everything from climate data to education data, economic data to crime data — all of which has been buried, deliberately, because the figures were deemed politically inconvenient.
2. Firing those who collect the data: The White House’s layoffs, buyouts and hiring freezes have already undermined federal economic statistics collection, leading to a Reuters report two weeks ago noting that many economic experts were increasingly worried about the quality of official U.S. economic data.
And it’s not just the economy: ProPublica reported in April, “The data collection efforts that have been shut down or are at risk of being curtailed are staggering in their breadth. In some cases, datasets from past years now sit orphaned, their caretakers banished and their future uncertain; in others, past data has vanished for the time being, and it’s unclear if and when it will reappear.”
3. Firing those who release the data: The broader concerns about data integrity reached new levels late last week when Trump fired Erika McEntarfer, the then-head of the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics who had committed the grievous crime of releasing accurate information that the White House didn’t want to see.
Though the president didn’t explicitly threaten others as part of the move, he didn’t have to: Every official throughout the executive branch received a timely reminder that producing factual information that conflicts with Trump’s wishes and baseless assumptions will put their careers in jeopardy.
4. Making up data: The same president who condemned his own administration’s jobs data as “rigged,” “ridiculous,” “phony” and a “scam” boasted a few days later that he has successfully lowered the costs of prescription drugs by up to “1,500%” — which remains a literal impossibility. But this happens practically every day. Trump keeps claiming that gas prices have fallen below $2 per gallon in several states, which is demonstrably false. Confronted with discouraging public opinion research, Trump also has a habit of making up imaginary approval ratings for himself. He makes up inflation data. And figures related to construction costs. And tax data. And trade data. And crime data. How is this different from the White House’s routine lying? As MSNBC’s Catherine Rampell recently explained in a column for The Washington Post, “For months, President Donald Trump has waged war on objective, reliable federal statistics. By ‘statistics,’ I mean the bits of information, large and small, that Americans might take for granted but need to make sense of the world. These figures help families decide where to live, physicians how to treat their patients, and businesses what to sell or whether to hire.” Data, in other words, matters. And as recent events have made clear, what we don’t know can hurt us.
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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