Trump's efforts to control information echo an authoritarian playbook
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.
Trump's war on facts reached new heights on Friday when he angrily fired Erika McEntarfer, the Labour Department official in charge of compiling statistics on employment in America, because he did not like the latest jobs report showing that the economy wasn't doing as well as he claims it was. 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.
The message, however, was unmistakable: government officials who deal in data now fear they have to toe the line or risk losing their jobs. Career scientists, long-time intelligence analysts and nonpartisan statisticians who serve every president regardless of political party with neutral information on countless matters, such as weather patterns and vaccine efficacy, now face pressure as never before to conform to the alternative reality enforced by the president and his team.
Trump has never been especially wedded to facts, routinely making up his own numbers, repeating falsehoods and conspiracy theories even after they are debunked and denigrating the very concept of independent fact-checking. But his efforts since reclaiming the White House to make the rest of the government adopt his versions of the truth have gone further than in his first term and increasingly remind scholars of the way authoritarian leaders in other countries have sought to control information.
'Democracy can't realistically exist without reliable epistemic infrastructure,' said Michael Patrick Lynch, author of the recently published On Truth in Politics and a professor at the University of Connecticut.
'Antidemocratic, authoritarian leaders know this. That is why they will seize every opportunity to control sources of information. As Bacon taught us, knowledge is power. But preventing or controlling access to knowledge is also power.'
British philosopher Sir Francis Bacon published his meditations on truth and nature more than four centuries before Trump arrived in Washington, but history is filled with examples of leaders seeking to stifle unwelcome information. The Soviets falsified data to make their economy look stronger than it was. The Chinese have long been suspected of doing the same. Just three years ago, Turkey's autocratic leader fired his government's statistics chief after a report documented rocketing inflation.
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