Trump’s War On Data

Epstein Coverup Just Another Case of Trump’s Anti-Transparency Agenda

Trump’s base-splitting fight to keep the Epstein files secret is only different because his base cares about it so intensely, but it’s completely typical of his overall effort to manipulate or suppress data that should be public.

On Friday, Aug. 1, Trump fired Dr. Erika McEntarfer, the commissioner of Labor Statistics in response to a disappointing jobs report, accusing her of faking job numbers before the 2024 election as well. Trump complained she was a Joe Biden appointee, but his previous appointee to the post, William Beach, immediately pushed back, calling the firing “totally groundless.” Later he explained, “These numbers are constructed by hundreds of people. They’re finalized by about 40 people.”

The previous Tuesday, July 29, Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency chief, Lee Zeldin, announced the intention to rescind the EPA’s 2009 endangerment finding that planet-warming greenhouse gases pose a threat to public health. The move was justified by a report from the Energy Department written hurriedly in two months by five climate-denying scientists, whose views are far outside the mainstream.

“If almost any other group of scientists had been chosen, the report would have been dramatically different,” said Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M University.

But these are just the latest examples a much more far-reaching pattern described by MSNBC’s Jen Psaki Friday night:

In the last six months he [Trump] deleted the Justice Department’s database that tracks police misconduct, deleted climate change data — data used by American farmers who had to sue the Trump administration to get some of it back — deleted a database that tracks the mass abduction of Ukrainian children, banned the National Cancer Institute from publishing information on vaccines, fluoride, autism and even peanut allergies without getting special approval from the demonstration, scrubbed all federal websites of anything that even remotely smacks of diversity, which at various points led to the deletion of references to important historical figures like Jackie Robinson and the Tuskegee Airmen.

He’s laid off the team that collects federal data on drug use in America. He’s eliminated the federal program that tracks maternal health in America. He’s stopped requiring power plants and industrial facilities from reporting the greenhouse gas emissions. He’s cut the part of the government that tracks U.S. educational achievement and he’s trying to scrap the Department of Education altogether.”

All this flies directly in the face of his press secretary’s claim that “President Trump is truly the most transparent and accessible president in American history.”

The only thing transparent here is the gaslighting.