What do you do when you can't trust the government?
The haze of contradictions and confusion is a feature, not a bug.
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We’re a month into President Donald Trump’s increasingly disastrous Iran war, and we have no idea what’s really going on.
In part, that’s because Trump is now nothing but a creature of pure id surrounded by enablers, running the country like an enormous out-of-control toddler. But it’s also because the administration is not at all interested in providing the American people with objective, reliable information.
That erasure of truth leaves us unmoored.
Trump’s increasing instability was always going to lead to chaotic, contradictory statements about the war, blurting out whatever ideas have taken hold in the nest of spiders inside his head.
These constant reversals about what he plans to do next aren’t always random or delusional, but the sheer volume of Trumpian proclamations that seem divorced from reality does a terrific job of obscuring when something is deliberate.
That was the case at least until earlier this week, when Trump decided to use the Iran war to engage in a little light market manipulation. Well, some pretty hefty market manipulation, actually.
Follow the money
Trump spent last weekend frothing at the mouth with threats to bomb Iran’s power plants unless it opened the Strait of Hormuz within 48 hours. Sure, attacking a country’s civilian energy infrastructure can be considered a literal war crime, but that sort of threat is really par for the course for Trump these days.
After ratcheting up his rhetoric all weekend, Trump abruptly reversed course Monday morning around 7:05 a.m., posting on Truth Social that the United States and Iran “have had, over the last two days, very good and productive conversations regarding a complete and total resolution of our hostilities in the Middle East,” According to Trump, the “tenor and tone of these in depth, detailed, and constructive conversations which will continue throughout the week” led him to postpone any strikes against power plants for five days. (Tellingly, Trump was unable to specify which if any Iranian officials were parties to these alleged negotiations.)
So while Trump was publicly telling Iran that he was prepared to do war crimes to get them to yield, the administration was also somehow simultaneously engaged in “good and productive conversations” with Iran about ending the war. Even in the shambolic world of the Trump administration, it seemed unlikely both of these things were true. But Trump contradicts himself so often that we’ve become accustomed to disregarding it as nothing but background noise, conveying nothing meaningful. It’s not worth trying to separate fact from fiction when it might all be fiction.
But it turns out that Iran wasn’t the audience for Trump’s bluster nor his improbable change of heart and newfound commitment to seeking peace. In fact, he wasn’t talking to Iran at all. He was talking to the markets, though it appears he did so only after tipping off some lucky duckies about what he was planning to do.
Because really, how else do you explain that about 15 minutes before Trump’s surprise announcement of how hunky dory talks were going, there was a sharp increase in purchases of stock market and oil futures? There was no discernible reason for these sudden jumps occurring at 6:50 am, normally a fairly sleepy time for premarket trading. But when Trump’s 7:05 am announcement about all those productive conversations predictably drove oil prices down, and stocks rebounded, those 6:50 am traders made bank. In just a few moments, those anonymous and fortunate folks made roughly $580 million.
Did Trump or one of his minions tip off some oil traders? Sure looks like it! Is this the first time Trump has used the war to move financial markets? Probably not! On March 9, while markets were still open, he offered the hopeful assessment that the war was “very complete, pretty much,” which juiced the markets. After the markets closed higher, though, Trump returned to doom and gloom, saying that “we’ve already won in many ways, but we haven’t won enough.”
After the fact, it’s fairly easy to discern what Trump is doing, particularly because he played the same game with tariffs before the Supreme Court took that particular toy away. But Trump’s consistently loose relationship with reality and the truth means that in the moment, it’s impossible to tell what is deliberate and consequential versus one of Trump’s innumerable off-the-cuff lies.
Trump isn’t the first president to lie to the American people, particularly about a war (Looking at you, Lyndon B. Johnson). He is, however, probably the first president to lie about everything and to fill his administration with people equally committed to eradicating any objective truth.
Waging war on shared reality
Even during the horrorshow of Trump’s first term, things weren’t this bad. Though Trump and the members of his administration were already perfectly happy to lie to the American people, they weren’t yet engaged in the wholesale destruction or alteration of the kind of government data that we’ve largely been able to take for granted. But those days are long gone.
Take, for example, economic data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Trump got mad after the July 2025 jobs report came in far weaker than expected, with the May and June reports also revised downward. So Trump fired the head of the BLS and went on Truth Social to say that the numbers were “RIGGED in order to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad.”
No, Trump didn’t offer any evidence to back this up, nor has any emerged since then. But the point wasn’t just to cry about how fake the July 2025 numbers allegedly were. It was also to create the perception that BLS data wasn’t reliable or true, subject to nefarious manipulation by Democrats.
It isn’t just conservatives who are the targets of this sort of message. MAGA types take Trump’s statement to mean that the data can’t be trusted because Democrats rigged it, with the implicit message that future Trump-approved reports are true and trustworthy. The rest of us see Trump’s attempts to suppress reports he doesn’t like, including firing the messenger, as an indication that we can never fully trust that future reports aren’t falsified in some pro-Trump way.
It didn’t help that the administration then used the shutdown as an excuse to push the October 2025 jobs report out a full month, only to say after the shutdown that whoopsie, it wasn’t going to release a full report for October ever, because it didn’t conduct the household survey, which determines unemployment rates, during the shutdown. Also gone forever? The Consumer Price Index report for the same month, as that survey data, was never collected either.
This isn’t inherently nefarious. In fact, the BLS commissioner Trump fired over the July jobs report, Erika McEntarfer, explained that since the BLS was entirely shut down, surveys couldn’t be conducted as usual, and couldn’t be conducted retroactively. Previous shutdowns, though, resulted only in minor delays in the release of jobs reports, whether due to the BLS being funded during a shutdown, the shutdowns being shorter than the 2025 one, or because the BLS rescheduled all data releases post-shutdown rather than just skipping some.
In short, it’s entirely plausible that the 2025 shutdown was a perfect storm of conditions at BLS that made it impossible to release those reports. But coming as it did on the heels of Trump’s firing of McEntarfer, there was inevitably a temptation to see it as purposeful, intended to obscure bad news for Trump.
Any disruption of BLS data is noticeable because the agency publishes the same reports every month. But plenty of government data isn’t required to be reported as regularly or as frequently, and if there is no particular reason you are interested in some chunk of government data, you may never notice its alteration or deletion. Prior to Trump’s second term, though, you could remain reasonably confident that government data would still exist and be reliably maintained.
Trump swiftly destroyed that confidence, though. The combination of the haphazard gutting of the federal workforce, the elimination of entire agencies, and the removal of thousands of datasets compromised both access to government data and confidence in that data.
Some data, like the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Research and Development Database, is just gone forever, with the administration not only stopping any new data collection but also deleting all access to existing data. It isn’t all that surprising that Trump wanted to get rid of climate change data, given how passionately he and his fellow dead-ender conservatives disbelieve in science. But the administration also deleted things like the CIA World Factbook, which had served for decades as a well-respected, publicly available, consistently maintained source of information about other countries. As with the NOAA database, it wasn’t just a decision to stop updating the Factbook. Every version of the Factbook is just gone, with no explanation as to why.
Entirely deleting data leaves a hole in our knowledge, but the administration’s alteration of government data has a more widespread, quietly pernicious effect.
The Lancet recently reviewed over 200 datasets and found that nearly half had modifications. However, only a few of the modified websites had any indication that anything had changed. Good luck feeling completely confident that what you’re seeing hasn’t been mucked about with behind the scenes. Similarly, it’s tough to feel fully certain of the data integrity of the dozens of health websites and datasets that the administration pulled down en masse, and then spent several months fighting a lawsuit over it. The administration finally agreed to restore many of the pages and databases to how they appeared on January 29, 2025, but it isn’t as if you’re going to be able to tell at a glance if all that data is intact.
As with BLS data, it isn’t that one should assume the government data you can still see is fake. It’s that even if you presume good intentions on the part of the administration — which you should never do — the churn of removal, alteration, and restoration of data undermines confidence in that data.
Conservatives are perfectly aware that liberals are not going to sign onto the project of treating every Trump utterance as infallible, but getting them to doubt their eyes and ears is good enough.
This isn’t just a problem for those of us forced to live under this deliberately messy regime — Trump’s actions on the world stage make it a problem for everyone. How can other countries trust that the United States is acting in an above-board, rational way? How can anyone meaningfully negotiate with a president who invents an entire set of peace talks just to ensure some pals get a windfall?
At root, this is the core project of the second Trump administration: to undermine any shared truth. That war on reality began in earnest with covid and the Big Lie about the 2020 election, where, in order to “prove” he won, Trump embarked on a multi-year project to demolish confidence in every election with a hodgepodge of lies and conspiracy theories. Now, that attitude applies to everything, and it’s corrosive and dangerous and ultimately, so very sad.
That’s it for now
We’ll be back later today with a new episode of Nir & Rupar. If you appreciate today’s PN, please do your part to keep us free and thriving by signing up for a paid subscription.
Thanks for reading, and for your support.
It helps to be reminded of the not so obvious ways that a run amok presidency has damaged our system of government. It's sad in a way that doesn't provoke white-hot fury like the issues around immigration enforcement and the Iran war do. Those issues will win the election for the Ds. The work will begin to address the other issues that will take a long time to recover from. I wish enough people would finally recognize the pattern that when Rs get into office, all they do is destroy. They don't know how to build.
RE: "But Trump contradicts himself so often that we’ve become accustomed to disregarding it as nothing but background noise, conveying nothing meaningful. It’s not worth trying to separate fact from fiction when it might all be fiction."
COMMENT:
In a 1974 interview, Hannah Arendt described how lying as a political strategy has a profound impact on people: "If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. … And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please.
Autocracies thrive on befuddled, ill-informed populations. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt noted, “In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow.”