- Trump’s tantrum;
- His own version of reality;
- Assaulting reporting, statistics, and the historical record;
- Ordering an independent office to become as big a liar as he is;
- Every accusation is a confession;
- The “Russia Hoax” is whatever he says it is;
- Lying about due process for immigrants;
- Headlines about entitlement, gerrymandering, decreasing crime, and cutting vaccine research.
The running theme here, not just today but for months and years, is that conservatives, especially the MAGA variety, have mistrusted people outside their tribe as either elites or dangerous immigrants, have mistrusted the government because they don’t understand its complex systems, have not “believed” in science because its findings contradict their religious myths, and so on. When reality seems to intrude on their stories, they blame conspiracy theories by outsiders, and they point to imaginary evidence, or misunderstanding of real evidence, as justification.
Yet lately, ironically, when there’s so much blatant evidence of their own elected officials lying and defying reality and ignoring the Constitution they claim to venerate, they’re just fine with it!
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NY Times, editorial board, 5 Aug 2025: This Isn’t Governing. It’s a Tantrum.
President Trump treats facts in the same way that he treats people: He expects them to line up in support of his goals, and if they don’t, he seeks to get rid of them.
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NY Times, analysis by Peter Baker, 3 Aug 2025: Trump’s Efforts to Control Information Echo an Authoritarian Playbook, subtitled “In firing the head of the agency that collects employment statistics, the president underscored his tendency to suppress facts he doesn’t like and promote his own version of reality.”
An old rule in Washington holds that you are entitled to your own opinions but you are not entitled to your own facts. President Trump seems determined to prove that wrong.
Don’t like an intelligence report that contradicts your view? Go after the analysts. Don’t like cost estimates for your tax plan? Invent your own. Don’t like a predecessor’s climate policies? Scrub government websites of underlying data. Don’t like a museum exhibit that cites your impeachments? Delete any mention of them.
Mr. Trump’s war on facts reached new heights on Friday when he angrily fired the Labor Department official in charge of compiling statistics on employment in America because he did not like the latest jobs report showing that the economy isn’t doing as well as he claims it is. Mr. Trump declared that her numbers were “phony.” His proof? It was “my opinion.” And the story he told supposedly proving she was politically biased? It had no basis in fact itself.
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The Atlantic, David A. Graham, 4 Aug 2025: A Terrible Five Days for the Truth, subtitled “Trump’s latest moves represent an assault on reporting, statistics, and the historical record.”
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.
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NY Times, Thomas L. Friedman, 4 Aug 2025: The America We Knew Is Rapidly Slipping Away
Of all the terrible things Donald Trump has said and done as president, the most dangerous one just happened on Friday. Trump, in effect, ordered our trusted and independent government office of economic statistics to become as big a liar as he is.
He fired Erika McEntarfer, the Senate-confirmed head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, for bringing him economic news he did not like, and in the hours immediately following, the second most dangerous thing happened: The senior Trump officials most responsible for running our economy — people who in their private businesses never would have contemplated firing a subordinate who brought them financial data they did not like — all went along for the ride.
What they should have said to Trump is this: “Mr. President, if you don’t reconsider this decision — if you fire the top labor bureau statistician because she brought you bad economic news — how will anyone in the future trust that office when it issues good news?” Instead, they immediately covered for him.
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Paul Krugman, 5 Aug 2025: The Paranoid Style in American Economics, subtitled “Remember, every accusation is a confession”
So Trump’s claim that disappointing economic numbers are fake news disseminated by radical leftists is ugly nonsense. But it was also predictable. Claiming that economic data you don’t like is fraud perpetrated by a deep state conspiracy has been standard practice on the right for a long time, going back to the “inflation truthers” of the Obama years.
Then recalling how unemployment soared after the 2008 financial crisis, and how those on the right predicted that Obama’s response would lead to runaway inflation. It didn’t.
But rather than admit that they had been wrong and rethink their economic models, many on the right insisted that runaway inflation actually was happening, but that government statisticians were hiding the ugly truth. For a while many right-wingers were eagerly citing quack analysts — sort of the economics equivalent of anti-vaxxers or climate deniers — to support outlandish claims about inflation. And I’m talking about influential voices, not obscure fringe figures. For example, in 2010 the historian Niall Ferguson, whom many still consider an important public intellectual, insisted that the official numbers were wrong and “double-digit inflation is back.” As far as I know, he has never owned up to his mistake.
And.
By the way, this isn’t a case of “everybody does it.” When inflation temporarily surged under Joe Biden, I’m not aware of any Democratic-leaning economist, inside or outside the administration, who denied the reality of the inflation numbers, let alone attributed them to a political conspiracy. The paranoid style in American economics is very much a right-wing thing.
And because on today’s right every accusation is a confession, I predicted even before Trump took office that his administration would do what he falsely accused Democrats of doing, and begin manipulating economic data.
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The Atlantic, David A. Graham, 5 Aug 2025: What, Exactly, Is the ‘Russia Hoax’?, subtitled “To start with, it’s not a hoax.”
Basically, it means whatever Trump wants it to mean, and continually changes.
Here’s what is not in dispute: The United States intelligence community concluded that Russia sought to meddle in the 2016 election and, according to a GOP-led Senate investigation, wanted to help Trump. As Special Counsel Robert Mueller wrote in a report summarizing his findings, “The Russian government interfered in the 2016 presidential election in sweeping and systematic fashion.” Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr., his son-in-law Jared Kushner, and his campaign chair Paul Manafort met at Trump Tower in June 2016 with Russians who they believed would hand over “dirt” on Hillary Clinton. (Steve Bannon—Steve Bannon!—called the meeting “treasonous.”) A Trump 2016-campaign aide boasted to an Australian diplomat that Russia was trying to help the Trump campaign, and then lied about his Russian contacts to FBI agents. Trump publicly called on Russia to hack Clinton’s emails in July 2016—jokingly, he has since said—and Russian agents attempted to do so that very day, according to the Justice Department. Hackers who the U.S. government believes were connected to Russia obtained emails from a number of Democratic Party officials and leaked them publicly, and Trump pal Roger Stone was apparently forewarned about some. Major tech companies, including Facebook and Twitter (now X), also confirmed that they had detected dubious Russian activity.
In spite of all of this evidence, or perhaps because of it, Trump has loudly insisted that it’s all a hoax.
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The right lies again.
Media Matters, 5 Aug 2025: Right-wing media’s campaign against due process for immigrants, subtitled “Figures on the right falsely claimed that migrants don’t — or shouldn’t — get constitutionally protected rights”
Their summary:
The Constitution guarantees due process rights for everyone in the United States, regardless of citizenship status, but as part of their ongoing effort to defend President Donald Trump’s mass deportations, right-wing media have repeatedly and wrongly insisted that immigrants are excluded from this constitutional protection.
Some right-wing media figures have alleged only “nut jobs” believe undocumented immigrants deserve due process, and some have claimed that even legal immigrants “have no rights at all.” Others on the right acknowledged that migrants have rights but cheered at the prospect of taking them away, lamenting that constitutionally enshrined rights like due process and habeas corpus were slowing down mass deportations.
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Items from my favorite aggregate site, JMG:
- From Washington Post: Trump: I’m “Entitled To Five More Seats” In Texas. Entitled? That’s not how it works.
- Fox Host: California Has A Democratic Governor And Two Democratic Senators Because Of Gerrymandering. Idiot. Gerrymandering is about voting for representatives for the House. Votes for governor and senators are state-wide and have nothing to do voting districts within each state.
- From CBS News, FBI Data: Crime Decreased In Every Category In 2024. As widely noticed in recent years. Conservatives, either by their easily-frightened natures, or mass media, simply do not believe this.
- From Associated Press: Kennedy Cancels $500M In Vaccine Research Contracts. Because he doesn’t want research to contradict what he already *knows*.
