A Terrible Five Days for the Truth

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

Awarding superlatives in the Donald Trump era is risky. Knowing when one of his moves is the biggest or worst or most aggressive is challenging—not only because Trump himself always opts for the most over-the-top description, but because each new peak or trough prepares the way for the next. So I’ll eschew a specific modifier and simply say this: The past five days have been deeply distressing for the truth as a force in restraining authoritarian governance.

In a different era, each of these stories would have defined months, if not more, of a presidency. Coming in such quick succession, they risk being subsumed by one another and sinking into the continuous din of the Trump presidency. Collectively, they represent an assault on several kinds of truth: in reporting and news, in statistics, and in the historical record.

On Thursday, The Washington Post revealed that the Smithsonian National Museum of American History had removed references to Trump’s record-setting two impeachments from an exhibit’s section on presidential scandals. The deletion reportedly came as part of a review to find supposed bias in Smithsonian museums. Now, referring to Presidents Andrew Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Bill Clinton, the exhibit states that “only three presidents have seriously faced removal.” This is false—Trump came closer to Senate conviction than Clinton did. The Smithsonian says the material about Trump’s impeachments was meant to be temporary (though it had been in place since 2021), and that references will be restored in an upcoming update.

If only that seemed like a safe bet. The administration, including Vice President J. D. Vance, an ex officio member of the Smithsonian board, has been pressuring the Smithsonian to align its messages with the president’s political priorities, claiming that the institution has “come under the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology.” The White House attempted to fire the head of the National Portrait Gallery, which it likely did not have the power to do. (She later resigned.) Meanwhile, as my colleague Alexandra Petri points out, the administration is attempting to eliminate what it views as negativity about American history from National Park Service sites, a sometimes-absurd proposition.

During his first term, Trump criticized the removal of Confederate monuments, which he and allies claimed was revisionist history. It was not—preserving history doesn’t require public monuments to traitors—but tinkering with the Smithsonian is very much attempting to rewrite the official version of what happened, wiping away the impeachments like an ill-fated Kremlin apparatchik.

The day after the Post report, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting announced that it will shut down. Its demise was sealed by the administration’s successful attempt to get Congress to withdraw funding for it. Defunding CPB was a goal of Project 2025, because the right views PBS and NPR as biased (though the best evidence that Project 2025 is able to marshal for this are surveys about audience political views). Although stations in major cities may be able to weather the loss of assistance, the end of CPB could create news and information deserts in more remote areas.

When Trump isn’t keeping information from reaching Americans, he’s attacking the information itself. Friday afternoon, after the Bureau of Labor Statistics released revised employment statistics that suggested that the economy is not as strong as it had appeared, Trump’s response was to fire the commissioner of the BLS, baselessly claiming bias. Experts had already begun to worry that government inflation data were degrading under Trump. Firing the commissioner won’t make the job market any better, but it will make government statistics less trustworthy and undermine any effort by policy makers, including Trump’s own aides, to improve the economy. The New York Times’ Ben Casselman catalogs plenty of examples of leaders who attacked economic statistics and ended up paying a price for it. (Delving into these examples might provide Trump with a timely warning, but as the editors of The Atlantic wrote in 2016, “he appears not to read.”)

The next day, the Senate confirmed Jeanine Pirro to be the top prosecutor for the District of Columbia. Though Pirro previously served as a prosecutor and judge in New York State, her top credential for the job—as with so many of her administration colleagues—is her run as a Fox News personality. Prior to the January 6 riot, she was a strong proponent of the false claim that the 2020 election was stolen. Her statements were prominent in a successful defamation case against Fox, and evidence in the case included a discussion of why executives yanked her off the air on November 7, 2020. “They took her off cuz she was being crazy,” Tucker Carlson’s executive producer wrote in a text. “Optics are bad. But she is crazy.”

This means that a person who either lied or couldn’t tell fact from fiction, and whom even Fox News apparently didn’t trust to avoid a false claim, is being entrusted with power over federal prosecutions in the nation’s capital. (Improbably, she still might be an improvement over her interim predecessor.)

Even as unqualified prosecutors are being confirmed, the Trump White House is seeking retribution against Jack Smith, the career Justice Department attorney who led Trump’s aborted prosecutions on charges related to subverting the 2020 election and hoarding of documents at Mar-a-Lago. The Office of Special Counsel—the government watchdog that is led at the moment, for some reason, by the U.S. trade representative—is investigating whether Smith violated the Hatch Act, which bars some executive-branch officials from certain political actions while they’re on the job, by charging Trump. Never mind that the allegations against Trump were for overt behavior. Kathleen Clark, a professor of law at Washington University in St. Louis, told the Post she had never seen the OSC investigate a prosecutor for prosecutorial decisions. The charges against Trump were dropped when he won the 2024 election. If anything, rather than prosecutions being used to interfere with elections, Trump used the election to interfere with prosecutions.

This is a bleak series of events. But although facts can be suppressed, they cannot be so easily changed. Even if Trump can bowdlerize the BLS, that won’t change the underlying economy. As Democrats discovered during the Biden administration, you can’t talk voters out of bad feelings about the economy using accurate statistics; that wouldn’t be any easier with bogus ones. Trump is engaged in a broad assault on truth, but truth has ways of fighting back.

Related:

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

Today’s News

The Texas House voted to issue civil arrest warrants for Texas Democrats who left the state to delay a vote on a Trump-backed redistricting map.
Steve Witkoff, President Donald Trump’s special envoy for peace missions, will head to Russia this week in an effort to secure a Ukraine cease-fire before a Friday deadline.
The European Union paused planned retaliatory tariffs on U.S. goods for six months amid ongoing trade talks with the Trump administration.

Dispatches

The Wonder Reader: Isabel Fattal compiles stories about how mail carriers manage to do a job that keeps the country running.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Photo illustration of an image of the Muppets next to a photo of the author with her dad — Illustration by Allison Zaucha / The Atlantic. Sources: Nina Brickman; Martin Hospach / Getty; CBS / Getty.

Grief Counseling With Kermit

By Sophie Brickman

After a great loss, some people find themselves communing with nature, at the seaside or deep in a forest. Others turn to spirituality, toward a temple or church. Me? I’d come to grieve with the Muppets.

Read the full article.