Hell-bent
Trump's assault on the truth—and on those who refuse to hide it or spin it as ordered—is becoming more aggressive. Who will be the next to fall or fight back?
“The First Amendment is just words on a page. Giving those words meaning—sustaining their promise, generation after generation—depends on a civic courage that seems, right now, to be in ominously short supply.” — Jameel Jaffer, executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University
NEW YORK—It’s one thing to disagree. It’s quite another to punish, harass, deport, fire and threaten the livelihoods of those with whom you disagree, especially if you’re the President of the United States. That’s not how this country works. Americans are born with the right to speak freely, and to publish freely—and to freely criticize public figures without fear of retribution.
And yet, since January, the start of Donald Trump’s second White House term, the president has been waging an expanding, unrestrained war on the truth, the rule of law and Americans’ constitutional right to free expression.
Last week, Trump’s battle accelerated, triggering a throaty, full-out assault on the truth found in professional news reporting, in data reports and in the historical record.
“Things are getting a little scary,” the former Treasury Secretary, Larry Summers, said Sunday on This Week. Former Republican congressman Chris Christie, also speaking on This Week, likened Trump’s efforts to mute news suggesting a slowing economy to that of a “petulant child.” He and others said over the weekend that Trump frequently tries to re-frame the truth in a way that “makes him look better” in public, while punishing those who refuse to go along.
Absurd? Maybe. (Some people still uphold Trump’s false claim that he, not Joe Biden, won the 2020 election.)
Let’s go back to what happened on Friday. It’s the latest in Trump’s ongoing attack on the free flow of information, which Tom Jones, a senior media writer at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, says “jeopardizes democracy.”
“Shooting the Messenger”
After a disappointing jobs report came out showing that economic output and consumer spending slowed in the first half of the year, Trump didn’t choose to investigate why the recent job numbers failed to match his rosier expectations. Instead, he fired the person who pulled together the data—Bureau of Labor Statistics Chief Erika McEntarfer, a nonpartisan statistician. Without evidence to back up his claims, Trump wrote on his social media platform, Truth Social, that the numbers were “RIGGED in order to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad” and the U.S. economy was, in fact, “BOOMING” on his watch.
It was a baseless claim.
Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, a Republican, told ABC’s This Week on Sunday: “When Trump gets news he doesn’t like, he needs to blame someone else because he won’t take the responsibility himself. Like, you give me bad news, I fire the messenger.”
Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers says Trump’s claim that the job numbers were “rigged” conveys “a preposterous charge—really scary stuff.” The Bureau always seasonally adjusts data estimates with actual results some months later.
“Firing a nonpartisan analyst for merely reporting bad news is the stuff of democracies giving way to authoritarianism. Firing statisticians goes with threatening news reporters and firing the heads of newspapers, and goes with launching assaults on universities, and launching assaults on law firms that defend clients who the elected boss finds uncongenial.” —Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers
Trump’s feud with government statisticians also runs headlong into his ongoing feud with Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell.
Trump has been threatening to fire Powell for months, saying he should be cutting interest rates—but cutting rates is what the Fed does when the economy is weak. Raising them is what the Fed does when the economy is growing—to avoid overheating. Is Trump also trying to politicize the Fed? Does he truly wish to have lower interest rates signaling a weak economy? So far, Powell has kept rates steady—and has refused to capitulate, upholding the Fed’s congressionally mandated independence.
What else?
Trump last week continued his push to silence the truth to get his way, building on earlier efforts since January to squeeze journalism, rewrite history and denounce the people, places and things which challenge what he wants:
Rewriting History. On Thursday, The Washington Post revealed that the Smithsonian National Museum of American History removed references to Trump’s two impeachments from an exhibit on presidential scandals. The deletion reportedly came as part of a review by administration officials tasked with finding “liberal bias” in Smithsonian museum exhibits. Now, referring to Presidents Andrew Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Bill Clinton, the exhibit states that “only three presidents have seriously faced removal.” This is false—Trump came closer to Senate conviction than Clinton did. Both Trump and Vice President J. D. Vance have been pressuring the Smithsonian to align its messaging with the president’s political priorities, claiming falsely that the institution, by citing Trump’s record-setting number of impeachments, has “come under the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology.”
Changing the storytellers. Previously, the White House also attempted to fire the head of the National Portrait Gallery, Kim Sajet, accusing her of being “highly partisan and a strong supporter of DEI.” [Trump has issued numerous executive orders and has taken other measures aimed at dismantling DEI across the federal government.] The Smithsonian rebuffed Trump’s attempt to fire Sajet, but she later resigned.
Changing the story. Trump also ordered the National Park Service to erase some historical references to Black slavery from its park signs and web pages, including those dedicated to explaining the history of the Underground Railroad and the Civil War to the American public. It’s messaging Trump says doesn’t align with his political narrative.
Silencing Journalism. On Friday, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting announced it will shut down because Trump was successful getting Congress to narrowly approve defunding it on a strict, party-line vote. This was a goal of Project 2025; the political right views PBS and National Public Radio as being liberally biased, though there is no hard data to back that up. While PBS/NPR stations in major cities may be able to weather the storm, the loss of federal assistance to CPB could create news and information deserts in more remote areas, chiefly in rural red-states.
Silencing Journalists. Last February, Trump barred the Associated Press from the White House press room because the news company and its reporters and editors initially refused to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America. Most recently, he called an NBC reporter “a disgrace” and “terrible” when he questioned Trump about the jet gifted to him by Qatar, valued at $400 million. Trump called another reporter “a very bad person” for asking about the timing of weather alerts ahead of deadly floods in Texas, which killed over 100 people.
Silencing Criticism. Trump also is suspected of playing a key role in the recently announced cancellation of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, which is now due to end in May 2026. There has been speculation that the cancellation was announced—wholly or in part—to appease Trump, as Paramount, which owns CBS, relied on the presidentially controlled Federal Communications Commission to approve its recent, $8 billion sale to Skydance. Colbert has long been a vocal critic of Trump.
Who and What’s Next?
Concern about Trump’s frequent challenges to the rule of law is rising among congressional Democrats and Republicans, alike. Some of Washington’s senior Republican lawmakers Friday openly condemned Trump’s decision to fire the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ statistician. “If Trump is firing her because he doesn’t like her numbers but they are accurate, then that’s a problem,” Wyoming Republican Senator Cynthia Lummis told the Guardian. “It’s not the statistician’s fault if the numbers are accurate but not what the president had been hoping for.” North Carolina Senator Thom Tillis, also a Republican, said: “If (McEntarfer) was just fired because the president or whoever … didn’t like the numbers, they ought to grow up.”
The good news? More legal scholars, red and blue, are starting to step forward to challenge what they say is Trump’s excessive use of executive power to undermine the role of politically independent federal agencies, the government’s allegiance to the constitution and the rule of law.
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
—The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution
Law and More Order?
A new law firm, The Washington Litigation Group, is a conservative, nonprofit group and the latest legal firm to join an emerging group of pro bono organizations challenging the Trump administration, which is now facing about 375 lawsuits. This new firm will be focusing on legal challenges confronting the president’s use of executive power.
“We’ve just never before seen this kind of systematic effort by a President to use all possible levers of government power against perceived opponents inside the government,” says Peter Keisler, one of eight politically conservative members comprising The Washington Litigation Group’s steering committee. Keisler also is the founder of the conservative Federalist Society and a former assistant attorney general and acting attorney general for President George W. Bush.
Meanwhile, a left-leaning group, Democracy Forward, one of the biggest nonprofit law organizations, is opening a new office this week designed to challenge Trump’s mass, targeted firings of civil servants and eliminate federal programs authorized by Congress.
Says LeFrance, The Atlantic’s executive editor: “Donald Trump may believe he has the authority to do whatever he wishes, the legislative and judiciary branches be damned. But he still has to answer to the people.
“Freedom of speech makes this country great. It keeps power in check. It brings truth to light. Trump has tried repeatedly to classify many Americans he doesn’t like as being ‘enemies of the people’ but they are the people. And it’s none of the government’s business what any of its people choose to say about it.”
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Good piece! Thanks for sharing!