It’s no secret that Donald Trump is an inveterate liar, a propagandist, a carny barker, a promulgator of Fake News. (Pro tip: those who routinely call truth “fake news” are the likely fakers.)
During the first Trump term, the Washington Post did the hard work of documenting each of Trump’s lies and came up with more than 30,000 of them. In the second Trump term, the Post hasn’t bothered. Who has the staff to do that anymore.?
Meanwhile, Post owner Jeff Bezos, the media oligarch, has become a Trump lackey. And the newspaper’s fact checker, Glenn Kessler, has just taken a buyout.
But lying as Trump does, with every breath he takes, is one thing.
In the Trump restoration, they’ve upped the ante and moved on to attacking whomever they think might dare tell the truth. If you’re looking for a hallmark for authoritarianism, there it is. Ask George Orwell, who I’ve heard good things about, who once said, “The further a society drifts from truth, the more it will hate those who speak it.”
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The full-on assault on truth is not exactly a new thing. But the assault has become so expansive that I’d expect Trump’s next move would be to replace the Department of Education — already under attack — with the Ministry of Truth.
And so, the Voice of America, which was a trusted new source in a world filled with propaganda, is all but gone.
And the Corporation for Public Broadcasting has lost enough federal funding under the Big, Ugly, Contemptible Bill that it is closing its doors. And when those doors close, you can expect many public media outlets, particularly those in small-town and rural America that most depend on CPB funding, to eventually shut down, too.
That followed Trump’s request that the Smithsonian Museum of National History remove mention of Trump’s two impeachments from an exhibit on presidential scandals. The exhibit now claims that “only three presidents have seriously faced removal.” The three so named are Andrew Johnson, Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton. Well, Nixon, who was in jeopardy, wasn’t actually impeached, and Clinton was never in danger of being removed.
And, yes, to fully document Trump’s scandals, you’d need at least half a dozen museums working full time.
Let’s not forget Trump’s whitewashing of national parks and monuments and anything else in the federal government that still has a vision of telling the truth — both good and ill — about the American story.
And then there is Trump’s multi-pronged assault on corporate media, on big law, on elite colleges and universities. Media companies have paid off bribes. Big law has caved, in too many instances, to Trump demands. And elite schools have been presumed, by default, to be antisemitic and also guilty of DEI violations and have become subject to bribes in order to keep their funding for pet projects like, uh, cancer research.
And if Trump is president, then Barack Obama must be a traitor, and so Attorney General Pam Bondi is appointing a special prosecutor to launch a grand jury investigation into the uber-clean Obama administration for its handling of the so-called Russia hoax.
If Trump is president, the judges who ruled against him in various lawsuits and prosecutors who prosecuted — Trump calls it “persecuted” — are under investigation. That would have been a great bet back in the day, by the way — that Jack Smith would go to prison before the Trumpster.
Are you exhausted? Well, sorry. Gotta buckle up, friends.
Because now Trump has gone all in, accusing Erika McEntarfer, the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, of rigging the books when presenting the latest BLS jobs data.
The numbers came in lower than expected for July, and the numbers for the previous two months were severely downgraded. Yes, we know this happens all the time. It’s not an exact science.
But since the Trump economy is supposed to always be red hot, the ice-cold news could not be tolerated, which may or may not explain why Trump was seen Tuesday on the White House roof.
So Trump fired McEntarfer, noting that she was a Biden appointee while failing to mention that the U.S. Senate had approved her nomination overwhelmingly.
And, to announce the firing, Trump posted on his social media site: “We need accurate Job Numbers. I have directed my Team to fire this Biden Political Appointee, IMMEDIATELY. She will be replaced with someone much more competent and qualified. Important numbers like this must be fair and accurate, they can’t be manipulated for political purposes.”
Economists, not necessarily known for their sense of humor, doubled over laughing. For political purposes, really? If you know anything about how the BLS works, you know that one person, even the head person, couldn’t possibly fix those numbers on her own. It would have to be a vast conspiracy at the level only Trump could imagine.
Getting rid of the well-respected McEntarfer, who has served in Republican and Democratic administrations, would accomplish nothing. Except, of course, to allow Trump to insist the economy is better than ever.
And this truth, according to people in the know, is an important one, because the bureau numbers are not only the gold standard for American businesses looking to make investment decisions, but also for those businesses around the world that have anything to do with the American economy, and also for those countries who still simply rely on the dollar.
The tariffs are bad enough. Trump’s threats to fire Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, whom he appointed, are maybe just as dangerous. Calling any election he loses, and even those he wins, rigged is more dangerous than we can imagine.
But where are we when Trump attacks government-produced numbers as a personal assault on him? I guess the same place as when he attacked the FBI and the CIA and the NSA and god knows who else.
Misinformation is bad enough in our time. Disinformation is a cancer and a crisis that everyone must recognize.
Just look at what Trump posted about McEntarfer after he fired her: “Today’s Job Numbers were RIGGED in order to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad.”
To further make the case, Trump would go on to claim that the bureau had released good job numbers just before last November’s election in order to help Biden, and only then were those good numbers “massively revised DOWNWARD” after the election.
Why? You know why. To hurt Trump.
That could have been suspicious, I guess, but the downward revisions under Biden didn’t happen after the election. They were announced last August, calling, it turns out, the Biden-Harris economy into question. Which Trump did when the Biden numbers went down.
Did Trump get that wrong, or did he lie about it? Is it misinformation or disinformation or both?
Who knows what Trump actually believes? But we know what he says.
Without any evidence whatsoever, Trump calls the latest jobs numbers a “TOTAL SCAM.” But actually, there was NO SCAM. There is NO SCAM.
There is an ASSAULT on the TRUTH. And an ASSAULT on those who try to be the TRUTH-TELLERS.
And like Trump’s assault on democracy, his attacks on truth accelerate with each minute of each day. No friggin’ lie.
Mike Littwin has been a columnist for too many years to count. He has covered Dr. J, four presidential inaugurations, six national conventions and countless brain-numbing speeches in the New Hampshire and Iowa snow. Sign up for Mike’s newsletter.
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