Facts can be stubborn things, but the Trump administration has declared war on those facts that don’t support its narrative. When confronted by inconvenient facts, it fires the messengers and sues the fact-checkers.
On Aug. 1, the Bureau of Labor Statistics published low monthly job numbers that raised questions about Trump’s stewardship of the U.S. economy. He called the numbers rigged, fired the BLS commissioner and replaced her with a visiting fellow from the Heritage Foundation, the group behind Project 2025, blueprint for Trump 2.0.
In July, the administration said it won’t publish the latest edition of the National Climate Assessment, a legally mandated report on climate change previously published every four or five years on government websites and used by scientists around the world.
“The administration said it won’t publish the latest edition of the National Climate Assessment.”
Trump has cited inaccurate crime statistics to justify his “emergency” federal takeover of the Washington, D.C. police force. National parks have scrubbed their signs and bookstores of information about slavery or Native Americans that conflict with Trump’s anti-DEI agenda. And the Smithsonian Institution has been told to remove “divisive or partisan narratives” from its eight museums and instead “celebrate American exceptionalism.”
The Washington Post summarized Trump’s effort to suppress “inconvenient data” and replace it with content he prefers:
This month marked an escalation in Trump’s war on data, as he repeatedly tries to undermine statistics that threaten his agenda and distorts figures to bolster his policies. The latest instances come on top of actions the administration has taken across federal health, climate and education agencies to erase or overhaul data collection to align with the administration’s agenda and worldview.
The president’s manipulation of government data threatens to erode public trust in facts that leaders of both parties have long relied on to guide policy decisions. A breakdown in official government statistics could also create economic instability, restrain lifesaving health care and limit forecasts of natural disasters.
The current war on facts reaches many areas of government.
The Government Accountability Office, which was established to track federal spending, has opened dozens of investigations into Trump’s withholding of billions of dollars in congressionally legislated spending. Twice the GAO found Trump had violated federal rules. Now, Trump is working with GOP members of Congress to defang the GAO and halt its oversight.
Every June, the Education Department publishes the annual Condition of Education report using data from preschool through university, but so far there’s no 2025 version of the report from the downsized department Trump says he wants to eliminate.
“The Environmental Protection Agency hired a group of climate change denialists.”
The Environmental Protection Agency hired a group of climate change denialists to write a report that questions humans’ role in global warming. The EPA is now using the report to invalidate a 2009 government finding that climate pollution is harmful to human welfare. Environmental groups have sued.
Media Matters for America, a progressive group that frequently reports on the Trump administration, highlighted the background of one of the global warming report’s scientists, who has worked with an anti-environmental institute funded by energy companies: “Roy Spencer is a research scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, an adviser to the Heartland Institute, and a former visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation who was known as Rush Limbaugh’s ‘official climatologist.’”
The Federal Trade Commission has said it is investigating Media Matters. In 2023, the group reported on Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, which he renamed X, and on the increase of antisemitic content on the platform after he took control.
Companies’ ads were appearing alongside neo-Nazi and antisemitic content, Media Matters reported, which led some advertisers to dial back their ad spending on the social media platform, angering Musk.
Media Matters sued the FTC to halt the probe. A judge ruled on Aug. 15 that the FTC’s investigation was “a straightforward First Amendment violation” and issued an injunction preventing it from moving forward.
But the ruling is a hollow victory as Media Matters has suffered financial pressures and laid off staff, according to The New York Times.
Trump’s war on facts made this year’s international gathering of some 400 fact checkers a somber affair.
“After years of exponential growth, political fact-checking was in retreat and under fire,” reported the Washington Post. “And somehow, even as fact-checking surged in the past decade, so had the wave of false claims and narratives swamping the world.”
The Post’s Fact Checker, which recorded more than 30,000 false or misleading claims by Trump during his first term in office, is one of three major U.S. fact-checking groups. The others are PolitiFact and FactCheck.org.
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