“I’ve been right about everything,” Trump said at the United
Nations on Tuesday, deriding clean energy as a “green scam” and the notion of a
carbon footprint as a “hoax made up by people of evil intentions.” He was on a
roll, having just insisted that Tylenol causes autism if women take it when
pregnant.
Trump has always made things up. Remember that he entered
politics promoting the hoax that Obama wasn’t born in the United States. But
what’s new about Trump’s second presidency is that not only have his lies
escalated in dimension and scope, becoming increasingly brazen and weird—London
is under sharia law!—but he’s also waging a concerted all-out war on facts
that contradict his narrative, which is to say, all reliable sources of data.
The U.S. government has long been one of the best
sources of data on earth, and, relative to other governments, ours has long
made this easily accessible to journalists and citizenry alike. All that is grinding
to a halt under Trump, who doesn’t want any facts to get in the way of his
made-up stories. From now on, there will be as little data as possible, and
that’s by design.
To declare that Trump has been right and the scientists have
been wrong about climate change is so counterfactual that it requires a massive
suppression of available data. Good thing Trump has thought of that. Through a
combination of layoffs and weird directives, his administration has
dramatically reduced
its ability to collect data on industrial pollution that causes climate change,
extreme weather caused by climate change, greenhouse gases contributing to
climate change—really any facts related to the climate crisis. To take
just one example, an effort launched by the Biden administration to collect
emissions data was
canceled by Trump on his first day in office. The same could be said about
his Tylenol claims; lucky for him he has made significant
cuts to autism research.
Speaking of autism claims, the wild misinformation from
Trump and RFK Jr. about vaccine safety—including that vaccines (much like his claims about Tylenol) cause autism—will go
insufficiently challenged since he has cut vaccine research by more than half a
billion dollars.
Trump’s commitment to falsehood—and to eradicating facts
at their roots—is not limited to science and public health. This summer he
claimed that his policies were leading America into “another golden age” and
that economic growth under his presidency “shatters expectations.” The data said
otherwise: Whether you’re talking about job growth, inflation, or just
about any other measure, the numbers did not chart in a direction favorable to
the president. Here again, Trump is not willing to tolerate the facts: When the Bureau
of Labor Statistics last
month reported numbers that contradicted his sunny narrative, he fired the head
of the agency.
Trump and his administration say so many bizarre things
about crime, especially in cities run by Democrats. He will say that violence is
surging even where it is in fact decreasing, sometimes at historic rates; he’ll
imply that it’s all caused by immigrants when in fact relatively little crime
is committed by immigrants.
MAGA world is similarly intent on spinning fictions about
crime committed by transgender people. After one transgender person shot and killed people at
a Catholic school in Minneapolis, White House
aide Sebastian Gorka said on CNN that mass
shooters “who were confused about their gender to put it mildly” were targeting
Christians because of a “trans ideology.” He claimed that there had been
seven such incidents in “just the last couple of years.” The president’s son Donald Trump Jr. said earlier this month that he couldn’t name a mass shooting
that wasn’t committed by “a transgender lunatic.” Just before he was shot,
Charlie Kirk was asked how many such shooters there were, and he went with an
inflammatory “too many.” In fact, there may be fewer than five mass shootings
by transgender people in the last 12 years. Only 0.1 percent of mass shootings are committed by transgender people—and very
few murders of any kind.
It will be increasingly hard for correctives on such points
to get traction, however, since Trump’s administration has greatly reduced its
own ability to collect
and disseminate accurate information about crime, removing
research staff, as well as impeding the public’s access to crime data, making it increasingly easy for Trump and his administration officials and
supporters to freely fearmonger about any vulnerable minority.
Without data, it is also going to be hard not only to
fact-check Trump and his cronies but to measure the (most likely
horrific) impact of Trump’s policies. That too is almost certainly intentional—or
at least very convenient for him. This week, Trump’s Agriculture Department cut
its annual food insecurity survey, so Americans won’t know how many people
are going hungry as a result of Trump’s cuts to food stamps and other vital
assistance programs, not to mention his inflationary tariffs.
Speaking of inflation, other than our own observations at
the grocery store or neighborhood food pantry lines, or paying our bills, we won’t have much
information on inflation given Trump’s reign of censorship and austerity at the
Bureau of Labor Statistics, which tracks prices as well as jobs. (We also won’t
know much about the job market, which is likely negatively affected by tariffs,
immigration raids, and many other chaos-inducing Trump antics.) We won’t know
how badly our children are faring in school as a result of the massive cuts to
K-12 education,
since he has gutted the Department of Education’s research offices, including
the irreplaceable National Center for Education Statistics.
Of course, Trump’s war on facts has not been limited to
their government sources. The two other major institutional sources of
information and knowledge, besides the federal government, are universities and
the media. Academic institutions have faced Trump’s constant threats and orders
defunding them by billions of dollars. As for the media, the
administration has attempted to broadly censor their output through crippling lawsuits
and totalitarian threats by the Federal Communications Commission.
Some states, universities, and nonprofits are banding
together to try to redress the desperate dearth of data that the president has
created. The
American Geophysical Union and the American Meteorological Society began working
together to carry out the National Climate Assessment after Trump canceled
it. Ten Northeastern states are banding together to collaborate on vaccine data
collection and recommendations (since RFK Jr. and Trump have fully abdicated
this responsibility even as Covid and measles and other preventable infectious
diseases continue to claim the lives of the unvaccinated, including children).
Many similar projects are underway. Such efforts are necessary
and will go a long way to prevent the total eradication of facts and data
guiding our policy conversation and decisions. The preservation of some
information infrastructure will literally save lives. But it seems unlikely
that even such formidable institutions as states, universities, and other nonprofits
can make up for a loss of the data juggernaut that our federal government once
was. The information these federal workers provided was irreplaceable, and the
data-collection infrastructure they built must be considered a model for a more
informed post-Trump future.
The assault on data, research, and facts is fundamental to
Trump and his authoritarian regime. He seems to understand that data provides
the basis for arguments, and he does not want any arguments. He also
understands that facts and knowledge can only be nourished and sustained by
institutions and experts, so he is destroying those institutions and pink-slipping those experts. We must appreciate their importance and their stakes as
well as he does, and remain as committed to the institutions, the data, the facts, and the experts as Trump is to their eradication. He has brought sincere zeal to
their destruction, and we must bring an even greater passion to their
restoration and renaissance. We will need it, as ours is the harder job.
The post Trump Is Waging a Catastrophic War on Data appeared first on New Republic.
