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Trump Declares All-Out War on Reality [w/ Edit] [1]

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Date: 2025-01-25

Back in Trump’s first term, Hurricane Dorian was heading for the United States. When Trump was first briefed on it, he was told there was maybe a 5% chance part of Alabama would be hit. By the time Trump spoke about it to the press, that estimate was out of date — there was no chance of Dorian getting anywhere near Alabama — but Trump warned about it anyway. After that, every time a weather agency tried to correct the report, every time it tried to reassure Alabamans, Trump forced them to back down. He insisted on putting Americans at the risk of panicking over a nonexistent threat rather than admit that he had been wrong, or even blame someone else for giving him wrong information.

That action, while one of many such in his first term, is to me a paradigmatic presentment of what he is up to this time around. He has a fixed notion of reality that supports his ego, and he has figured out how to use his extraordinary power to make sure that no one in the government, and if possible no one else, will be allowed to contradict, explain, correct, or even try to modify anything he happens to say, regardless of how far from reality it really is.

We’ve had many stories in the past week about this or that action he’s taken along these lines:

Trump’s ‘Biological Truth’ Executive Order is Not Based in Biology or Truth: his insistence that there are only two genders, XX (female) and XY (male) is not backed up or accepted by scientists who actually are experts in this field.

Trump attacks Rachel Maddow, MSNBC and CNN: Rachel in particular has been doing an excellent job in dismantling Trump’s fantasies, and he can’t allow that. One of those fantasies is that he can get the FCC to revoke MSNBC’s license — but MSNBC is a cable network and isn’t licensed or in any other way controlled by the FCC. And speaking of Rachel:

Maddow blasts Trump for his dangerous public health gag order: She points out that Trump doesn’t want the public to know anything about bird flu driving up the price of eggs, which goes along with Trump doesn't want you to know if another deadly pandemic might kill you. Also : Trump Administration Temporarily [sic] Mutes Federal Health Officials. That is out of pure spite and revenge on those government agencies that refused to go along with his Covid denials and fantasies because they wanted the American people to know what was happening and what precautions to take. Trump wants to make sure that won’t happen the next time.

Trump freeze on NIH grant reviews alarms scientists, with long-term impact uncertain

NIH Meeting Cancellations Could Impact Cancer Research (registration required)

Trump doesn't only want to end DEI. He's also voiding a Civil Rights-era anti-discrimination rule. (The racist-in-chief wants to deny that racism exists. See How Trump ignited the fight over critical race theory in schools from 2021.)

Nobel economist Paul Krugman says Trump's policies will leave his blue-collar base feeling 'brutally scammed' Trump loves him those tariffs, and he is absolutely certain they will be paid for by foreign governments and that tariffs will force them to bend to his will — such as threatening to hit Denmark with tariffs if they don’t sell Greenland to him. Krugman says he’s only going to hurt his own base, but Krugman’s just a Nobel laureate in economics, so what does he know?

Trump says California’s mismanagement of forests and water is to blame for wildfires. Here’s the reality. We have a lot of problems here in California with wildfires, but Trump’s continued insistence that our politics and our policies are somehow to blame not only isn’t helping, it’s actively hindering any effort to fix them. But Trump will not be deterred from his fantasies about our state (though at least he didn’t bring any rakes with him on his visit to L.A. yesterday). It’s also tied to his repeated denials about global climate change — a denial of reality that presents an existential threat to the entire human species.

I can cite a lot more examples — and feel free to do so in the comments — but my point is this: More than any other official in the federal government, the president is expected to deal with reality. We spend billions of tax dollars a years making sure the White House has the most accurate information possible, both foreign and domestic, to guide the president’s decisions. Furthermore, the power of the presidency is such that it can be used to alter reality and our perception of reality; he can limit what information we have access to in the name of national security and by the credibility given to the “bully pulpit.” It is an awesome responsibility — and one that Trump has no interest at all in taking care to fulfill. Quite the opposite: he sees all these powers and tools as playthings for him to manipulate so as to make reality match his fantasies and to keep the American people, supposedly his employer, from finding out that he might be wrong.

Reality does not take kindly to being ignored or contradicted. It may take a while — sometimes it takes centuries — but eventually reality wins out. It forced us to admit the earth revolves around the sun, that the world was not created in six days, that women can be just as smart (or dumb) and just as competent (or incompetent) as men, that Barack Obama did as good a job or better than his white predecessors, that sames-sex marriage did not bring down the wrath of God, and so on. I picked these examples deliberately because all of them are either once again or still under challenge from Trump and the forces that backed him because of his promise to shelter them from the real world and all its complexities.

This is what war looks like now. Gird up your loins.

------------------— Edit 9:00 PM Pacific -----------------------—

Two new stories this evening are further evidence of my thesis:

Hegseth’s Views May Clash With Reality at the Pentagon (NYT)

Trump wiped January 6 convicts’ records clean. Now his DOJ is wiping evidence of rioters’ crimes from the internet (CNN)

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