the outdated philosophical query: “If a tree falls within the forest and nobody is round to listen to it, does it make a sound?”
Properly, in President Trump’s America, the reply would depend upon whether or not or not he needed it to.
In a world the place the one “fact” is discovered on Trump’s Reality Social, the one “info” are various ones, and the one helpful “theories” are conspiracy ones, there won’t even be a tree. Or a forest. Or a sound.
That is the “actuality” we’re all residing in now: the president of the US, lengthy a fan of invention and propaganda, has co-opted and corrupted knowledge, science, math, analysis, intelligence and info for the needs of presenting solely what he needs to be seen.
On Friday, Trump fired Erika McEntarfer, a little-known statistician on the Bureau of Labor Statistics who till then had overseen the tabulation of the month-to-month jobs report. Not as a result of her numbers had been fallacious, however as a result of he didn’t like them, a reality he made clear in a Reality Social put up later that day.
“For my part, at present’s Jobs Numbers had been RIGGED in an effort to make the Republicans, and ME, look unhealthy.”
After all, there’s zero proof that the July jobs numbers had been “RIGGED,” nor that McEntarfer was performing some form of mathematical voodoo on them to undercut Trump. The truth is, Trump liked the job she was doing only a month earlier. “GREAT JOBS NUMBERS, STOCK MARKET UP BIG! AT THE SAME TIME, BILLIONS POURING IN FROM TARIFFS!!!” he posted in June.
McEntarfer, in fact, didn’t invent the roles numbers. She merely calculated them. So it is a little like firing Isaac Newton for locating gravity — apples fall off timber whether or not he wrote the regulation of common gravitation or not.
This wasn’t the primary time Trump’s tried to proverbially shoot the messenger for saying issues he didn’t like. It wasn’t even the primary time this week.
On Tuesday, NPR reported that Trump ordered NASA to finish two satellite tv for pc missions that produce knowledge on local weather change and greenhouse gases — knowledge that’s used not solely by climatologists, however climate businesses, oil and fuel corporations, the Division of Agriculture, and farmers to measure carbon dioxide, plant development, crop yield, drought circumstances, and extra.
Destroying these satellites and the info they produce gained’t make the info any much less actual or essential. However in Trump’s thoughts, I suppose, if we are able to’t see it, it isn’t taking place.
Final month, the Smithsonian eliminated references to Trump’s two impeachments from an exhibit on the Nationwide Museum of American Historical past following strain from the White Home to take away an artwork museum director.
Again in January of 2017, he referred to as the appearing director of the Nationwide Park Service the day after he was inaugurated over a tweet the company shared evaluating his inauguration crowd measurement to a different bigger one. He reportedly requested him to share photographic proof that his crowd was larger than what the media was reporting, and the tweet the NPS initially shared was later eliminated.
In 2019, somebody, presumably at Trump’s course, comically altered a Nationwide Hurricane Middle map with a Sharpie to mirror Trump’s incorrect predictions for the trail of Hurricane Dorian. Trump had insisted it might hit Alabama, contradicting climate forecasts that mentioned it wouldn’t, after which supplied the clearly altered map as proof he was proper about its trajectory, even after Dorian spared Alabama and moved up the Atlantic coast. Science be damned.
This sort of knowledge delusion and reality fiction is, on the one hand, very unhappy, the mark of a person too fragile, impotent and incompetent to simply accept actuality or stand up to criticism.
However it’s additionally self-sabotaging. Leaders who favor propaganda and lies over fact and info not solely deliberately mislead the general public and warp actuality, they undermine belief in each establishment, together with and finally ones they could even want individuals to imagine in.
We’re seeing this now with the Jeffrey Epstein conspiracy. After spending years pushing baseless theories in regards to the lifeless youngster intercourse offender, the Trump administration now needs MAGA voters to imagine there’s nothing to see there. The issue? The establishments saying there’s nothing to see there — the FBI and the Justice Division — are ones that Trump and MAGA have beforehand insisted can’t be believed.
No matter Trump’s philosophy that fact is malleable and info are politically subjective, I promise you, an actual world does exist — and in that actual world, the July jobs numbers had been unhealthy, local weather change is actual, he was impeached, the 2020 election wasn’t stolen, and every kind of different inconvenient truths persist.
Simply don’t inform him that.
S.E. Cupp is the host of “S.E. Cupp Unfiltered” on CNN.
