Lying By Erasing What's True
How the Trump administration withholds information we need
“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”
―George Orwell, 1984
Shortly after Donald Trump was elected last year, we started seeing changes in the US economy. Trump has made a number of staggeringly inept tariff decisions while at the same time using tax policy to shift trillions of dollars away from working families and into the pockets of the immorally rich. And while the US economy may be the strongest economy in the world, it is not invincible, and as it turns out, making bad decisions over and over again will result in consequences, and those consequences always land on working families the hardest.
In August, shortly after the Bureau of Labor Statistics released its monthly jobs report, we saw a clear indicator that Trump’s economic illiteracy was starting to have an impact. The jobs numbers were low, much lower than they should have been, and much lower than they were when Biden ran things. So what did Trump do about it? Well, he did what he always does. He fired the BLS director and claimed the report was rigged:
“I have directed my Team to fire this Biden Political Appointee, IMMEDIATELY,” Trump said on Truth Social. “She will be replaced with someone much more competent and qualified.”
Trump later posted: “In my opinion, today’s Jobs Numbers were RIGGED in order to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad.”
This is the Trump playbook, and it always has been. Claim credit for everything good, hide everything bad, and if anyone asks questions, deny anything bad even exists and then attack the person asking the question.
Fast forward a few months, and now it’s the holiday season. Trump’s failed policies have not changed, the economy has gotten progressively worse, and American families are hurting. Prices on just about everything are through the roof, companies are laying people off at a pace we haven’t seen since the pandemic, and in the new year, healthcare costs for tens of millions of Americans will double, triple, and in some cases, quadruple.
The US economy is in real trouble. Trump knows it, and he knows he’s to blame for it. So it’s time to start hiding and denying.
Normally, when making these kinds of claims, I would refer to data collected by the same Bureau of Labor Statistics Trump blamed for rigging the numbers back in July. But I can’t. The reason I can’t is because Trump has cancelled the report. Even though we all need to hear it, Trump is refusing to give us the bad news.
Meanwhile, as we struggle and prepare to struggle even more, Trump has nearly doubled his own personal wealth, using the presidency to enrich himself to the tune of about $3 billion in the last year. That’s not a typo - while we wonder how we’re going to feed ourselves, Trump is grifting his ass off at our expense. And adding insult to injury, now Trump is now doing rallies to tell his followers that “affordability is a hoax.”
That’s right, He is looking into the faces of the very people hurting the worst, and he’s telling them they aren’t hurting at all. The overdue bills are just lies. Your child’s hunger pains are fake news. The foreclosure notice is just a fun little joke. I swear the man would deny the sunrise if there was money to be made by doing so.
The monthly jobs report, once a staple of economic journalism in America and one of our best indicators of economic trouble, is now gone, but it isn’t going alone. Reports on everything from tariff impacts to food insecurity have been cancelled. Cover-ups and distractions are everywhere. All so Trump can claim that everything is just great. So he can keep on enriching himself at our expense. So he can keep hurting children. It goes beyond politics. We are now dealing with an administration that no longer recognizes the humanity of the people it governs. And they’re just getting started.
I’ve been looking for a metaphor that sums up the inhumanity we are now seeing each and every day from the very people who are supposed to be looking out for us, and I think I finally found it:
Trump could look into the eyes of a starving child and see only the opportunity to sell Mom and Dad a thousand dollar cheeseburger.
I don’t know much, but I know that.
Brett Pransky is a writer, a teacher, a father, and a husband, but rarely in that order. He spends his days amplifying the voices of freedom and democracy as an Editor right here at The Political Voices Network, and he spends his nights trying to fix the world one clever sentence at a time.