Trump’s efforts to control information echo an authoritarian playbook

3 months ago 7

By Peter Baker

August 4, 2025 — 3.30pm

Washington: An old rule in Washington holds that you are entitled to your own opinions, but you are not entitled to your own facts. President Donald Trump seems determined to prove that wrong.

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.

US President Donald Trump on Friday fired the Bureau of Labour Statistics commissioner.

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.

Erika McEntarfer paid the price for not delivering facts to Trump’s liking.

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.

Trump’s advisers defended the president’s decision to fire McEntarfer, saying he was only seeking accuracy, and they released a list of recent job estimates that were later revised. While revisions of job creation estimates are normal, they argued without evidence that recent ones indicated a problem.

The bureau’s “data has been historically inaccurate and led by a totally incompetent individual”, White House spokesman Taylor Rogers said on Saturday. “President Trump believes businesses, households and policymakers deserve accurate data when making major policy decisions, and he will restore America’s trust in this key data.”

Soviet leaders in 1917. They claimed the USSR as an economic powerhouse, but empty shops told a different story.

During his first term as president, Trump chastised the National Park Service for not backing up his off-the-top-of-his-head estimate of the crowd size at his inauguration. He used a Sharpie pen to alter a map to argue that he was right to predict that a hurricane might hit Alabama, and federal weather forecasters were rebuked for saying it would not.

Most explosively, he pressured Justice Department officials to falsely declare that the 2020 election was corrupt and therefore stolen from him, even after they told him there was no evidence of widespread voter fraud.

The infamous moment from Trump’s first term where he used a Sharpie to amend a weather map.

During this second term, Trump has gone further to force his facts on the government and get rid of those standing in the way. After just six months since his return to office, the Union of Concerned Scientists, a non-profit advocacy group, counted 402 of what it called “attacks on federal science”, nearly double its count from Trump’s entire first term.

Gretchen Goldman, president of the union and a former science adviser to then-president Joe Biden, said federal agencies such as the Bureau of Labour Statistics, whose director was fired by Trump on Friday, are meant to operate more independently to avoid the politicisation of data collection and reporting.

“Firing the top statistical official sends a clear signal to others across the government that you are expected to compromise scientific integrity to appease the president,” Goldman said. “This puts us in dangerous territory far from an accountable and reality-based government.”

Numbers ‘rigged’

The president’s decision to fire Erika McEntarfer came just hours after the Bureau of Labour Statistics issued its monthly report showing that job growth in July was just half as much as last year’s average. The bureau also revised downward the estimated job creation of the two previous months.

Trump erupted at the news and ordered her to be dismissed, claiming on social media that the numbers were “RIGGED in order to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad”. He offered no proof but just said it was “my opinion”.

Both Democrats and Republicans criticised the move, including Trump’s labour statistics chief from his first term, William Beach, who wrote on social media that it was “totally groundless” and “sets a dangerous precedent”.

Speaking with reporters before heading to his New Jersey golf club for the weekend, Trump asserted bias on the part of McEntarfer, who was appointed by Biden and confirmed by a large bipartisan vote in the Senate, which included JD Vance, then a senator and now the vice president. The example Trump offered as evidence was flatly untrue.

“Days before the election, she came out with these beautiful numbers for Kamala,” Trump said, referring to his election opponent, then-vice president Kamala Harris. “Then right after the election – I think on the 15th, November 15 – she had an 8 or 900,000-dollar [sic] massive reduction.” What he meant was that the bureau revised downward its estimate of how many jobs had been created by 800,000 or 900,000 only after the election so not to hurt Harris’ chances of victory.

Except that it actually happened the exact opposite way.

McEntarfer’s bureau revised the number of jobs created downward by 818,000 in August 2024 – before the election, not after it. And the monthly report her bureau released just days before the election was not helpful to Harris but instead showed that job creation had stalled. The White House offered no comment when asked about the president’s false account.

“It’s a post-factual world that Trump is looking for, and he’s got these sycophants working for him that don’t challenge him on facts,” said former Republican congresswoman Barbara Comstock.

But firing the messenger, she said, would not make the economy any better. “The reality is the economy is worse, and he can’t keep saying it’s better,” she said.

“Joe Biden learned that; people still experience the experience they have, no matter how much you tell them otherwise.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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