You know the old philosophical question: “If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?”
Well, in President Donald Trump’s America, the answer would depend on whether or not he wanted it to.
In a world where the only “truth” is found on Trump’s Truth Social, the only “facts” are alternative ones, and the only useful “theories” are conspiracy ones, there might not even be a tree. Or a forest. Or a sound.
This is the “reality” we’re all living in now: the president of the United States, long a fan of invention and propaganda, has co-opted and corrupted data, science, math, research, intelligence and facts for the purposes of presenting only what he wants to be seen.
On Friday, Trump fired Erika McEntarfer, a little-known statistician at the Bureau of Labor Statistics who until then had overseen the tabulation of the monthly jobs report. Not because her numbers were wrong, but because he didn’t like them, a fact he made clear in a Truth Social post later that day.
“In my opinion, today’s Jobs Numbers were RIGGED in order to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad.”
Of course, there’s zero evidence that the July jobs numbers were “RIGGED,” nor that McEntarfer was performing some kind of mathematical voodoo on them to undercut Trump. In fact, Trump loved the job she was doing just a month earlier. “GREAT JOBS NUMBERS, STOCK MARKET UP BIG! AT THE SAME TIME, BILLIONS POURING IN FROM TARIFFS!!!” he posted in June.
McEntarfer, of course, didn’t invent the jobs numbers. She merely calculated them. So this is a little like firing Isaac Newton for discovering gravity — apples fall off trees whether he wrote the law of universal gravitation or not.
This wasn’t the first time Trump’s attempted to proverbially shoot the messenger for saying things he didn’t like. It wasn’t even the first time this week.
On Tuesday, NPR reported that Trump ordered NASA to end two satellite missions that produce data on climate change and greenhouse gases — data that’s used not only by climatologists, but weather agencies, oil and gas companies, the Department of Agriculture, and farmers to measure carbon dioxide, plant growth, crop yield, drought conditions and more.
Destroying these satellites and the data they produce won’t make the data any less real or important. But in Trump’s mind, I guess, if we can’t see it, it isn’t happening.
Last month, the Smithsonian removed references to Trump’s two impeachments from an exhibit at the National Museum of American History following pressure from the White House to remove an art museum director.
Back in January of 2017, he called the acting director of the National Park Service the day after he was inaugurated over a tweet the agency shared comparing his inauguration crowd size to another larger one. He reportedly asked him to share photographic evidence that his crowd was bigger than what the media was reporting, and the tweet the park service originally shared was later removed.
In 2019, someone, presumably at Trump’s direction, comically altered a National Hurricane Center map with a Sharpie to reflect Trump’s incorrect predictions for the path of Hurricane Dorian. Trump had insisted it would hit Alabama, contradicting weather forecasts that said it wouldn’t, and then provided the clearly altered map as evidence he was right about its trajectory, even after Dorian spared Alabama and moved up the Atlantic coast. Science be damned.
This kind of data delusion and fact fiction is, on the one hand, very sad, the mark of a man too fragile, impotent and incompetent to accept reality or withstand criticism.
But it’s also self-sabotaging. Leaders who favor propaganda and lies over truth and facts not only intentionally mislead the public and distort reality, they undermine trust in every institution, including and eventually ones they may even need people to believe in.
We’re seeing this now with the Jeffrey Epstein conspiracy. After spending years pushing baseless theories about the dead child sex offender, the Trump administration now wants MAGA voters to believe there’s nothing to see there. The problem? The institutions saying there’s nothing to see there — the FBI and the Justice Department — are ones that Trump and MAGA have previously insisted cannot be believed.
Regardless of Trump’s philosophy that truth is malleable and facts are politically subjective, I promise you, a real world does exist — and in that real world, the July jobs numbers were bad, climate change is real, he was impeached, the 2020 election wasn’t stolen and all kinds of other inconvenient truths persist.
Just don’t tell him that.
S.E. Cupp is the host of “S.E. Cupp Unfiltered” on CNN.