‘Hallmarks of authoritarianism’: Trump banks on loyalists as he wages war on truth

Donald Trump is waging a war on truth by firing top officials who present facts he finds unpalatable, while he banks on key loyalists at executive agencies to bolster his policies and powers by “rewriting history’s narrative” and squelching dissent, say scholars and former officials.

Trump’s penchant for rejecting facts in an authoritarian style was especially revealed in August by his sudden firing of the Bureau of Labor Statistics commissioner, charging without evidence that her latest report was “totally rigged”, just hours after she released data undercutting his rosy economic boasts, say critics.

The firing was emblematic of Trump’s expanding battle against people and policies that challenge the US president’s often conspiratorial views about truth such as his 2020 election loss to Joe Biden, which Trump last fall falsely blamed again on “fraud”.

From the justice department to the Environmental Protection Agency to other key agencies, Trump loyalists have pushed falsehoods and taken radical steps to promote Trump’s policies and what a Trump adviser in 2017 dubbed “alternative facts”. In doing so, Trump and his top allies are acting in an authoritarian style by revising history, rejecting facts and widely accepted science, critics add.

“The irony in firing the widely respected economist and BLS commissioner Erika McEntarfer is that the commissioner has very little to do with the actual production of the figures Trump says were ‘rigged’,” said Peter Shane, who teaches constitutional law at New York University.

“‘Rigged’, in Trump-speak, just means ‘unfavorable to Trump’. To the extent the firing had an actual purpose, it was not to reform [the] BLS, but to send a message to all agency heads that the release of unflattering information, no matter how routine or how objective, would put their jobs in jeopardy,” Shane added.

Little wonder that Trump on 11 August announced he was nominating EJ Antoni, an economist at the rightwing Heritage Foundation who has been a vocal critic of the BLS, to replace her, and boasted that he “will ensure that the Numbers released are HONEST AND ACCURATE”.

Scholars, ex-justice department officials and even some conservatives say Trump’s and his loyalists attacks on truth have increased in his second term in dangerous ways, since he has avoided choosing the kinds of aides who before served as guardrails against some of his instincts to revise history and promote radical policies.

“The difference between Trump 1 and Trump 2 is that he now has no guardrails … Now Trump is surrounded by people who want to be like him. He learned his lesson of not having people around him who would say no to him,” said George Conway, a lawyer and board president of the Society for the Rule of Law, a group that includes several ex-justice department officials with Republican pedigrees who have been critical of Trump’s authoritarian-style moves.

Conway added: “He’s always tried to create his own set of facts. None of this is new. It’s part of Trump’s conspiratorial mindset.”

Shane stressed: “Sabotaging independent sources of knowledge, flooding communications media with disinformation, and rewriting history’s narrative to conform to ideology rather than fact are hallmarks of authoritarianism.”

Shane’s points are underscored by multiple Trump and administration actions, including Trump’s counter-factual charges that crime in Washington was “out of control” despite data released early this year that showed violent crime in DC was at a 30-year low.

Still, flanked by several cabinet members, Trump held a press conference to declare a “public safety emergency” and put DC police under temporary federal control, while deploying 800 national guard troops to America’s capital.

Elsewhere, Trump loyalists at the EPA moved this month to rescind its key 2009 endangerment finding, which has underpinned regulatory efforts to fight climate change since the Barack Obama administration as the agency increasingly rejects widely accepted scientific facts.

Likewise, the justice department impaneled a grand jury in August to investigate a conspiratorial charge by Trump’s director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, that Obama and some of his aides engaged in a “treasonous conspiracy” by launching inquiries in 2016 into Russian efforts to influence that election to help Trump win.

In another battle royale against facts, the health secretary and vaccine sceptic, Robert F Kennedy Jr, has stepped up efforts to block some vaccines that scientists regard as crucial weapons in fighting Covid and other diseases.

Critics say Trump’s moves to undermine facts have been escalating in dangerous ways.

“From government agencies to universities, the president is wielding the cudgel of federal money and the threat of presidential power to intimidate people whose data and ideas don’t support him,” said the Princeton political historian Julian Zelizer.

Zelizer said: “While many presidents have been critical of economic data [such as Herbert Hoover], this is a new level of hostility. Someone says something he does not like, that person is removed. The point is to create fear so that others think twice before saying something that is harmful to the administration.”

Shane of NYU warned that Trump’s administration allies have mimicked his actions.

“Trump’s top officials, many of whom lack the experience, judgment, intellect and temperament to do their jobs properly, know Trump’s playbook and are determined to remain where they are … Everyone around Trump sees he has paid very little cost for his perfidy. They’re following the boss.”

Leaders at key agencies have followed Trump’s playbook of attacking facts and widely accepted science with regulatory moves to undermine climate change science and alternative fuels.

The EPA, as well as the interior and energy departments, has stepped up efforts to throttle spending and regulations to expand wind and solar energy; Trump has attacked green energy as part of his conspiratorial view that climate change is a “hoax”, while aggressively promoting his fossil fuel agenda of “drill, baby, drill”.

“The Trump team has launched an all-of-government assault on wind and solar,” said Michael Gerrard, who runs the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University.

Gerrard said: “When Obama’s EPA issued the endangerment finding in 2009 there was a ton of scientific evidence supporting it. There are now 10 tons. There are a few ounces on the other side, but Trump’s EPA is seizing on the ounces as an excuse to wipe out our strongest legal tool to fight climate change.

“The EPA, the energy and interior departments, and even the Federal Aviation Administration, are using all available tools, and making up some new ones, to suppress these sources of clean power.”

Other experts and scientists are alarmed too that Kennedy has stepped up efforts to block vaccines he has long castigated without real evidence as dangerous.

Earlier this month, Kennedy announced in a statement the ending of 22 projects worth $500m to develop mRNA technologies that have been used in vaccines to combat respiratory viruses such as Covid and the flu.

In response to Kennedy’s move, Trump told reporters that “we’re on to other things” and said the administration was focused now on “looking for other answers to other problems, to other sicknesses and diseases”.

Trump, a former champion of the Covid vaccines, seems to have ignored several recent moves by Kennedy which health experts have sharply criticized. In July, Kennedy abruptly fired a 17-member CDC panel that recommends vaccines, and replaced it with a smaller committee that boasts some known vaccine sceptics.

Further, Kennedy has balked at offering strong support for vaccinations even as the CDC reported 1,356 measles cases as of this month, the highest total of annual cases since 2000, when the United States declared measles eliminated.

On a legal battlefront, former prosecutors say truth and facts are under assault at the justice department, which increasingly has acted without solid evidence of misconduct to investigate Trump’s declared foes, such as the former FBI director James Comey and ex-CIA director John Brennan.

Trump in July baselessly accused Obama of “treason” for his administration’s inquiry into Russian influence efforts to help Trump win in 2016. The move came despite multiple reports, including one from the bipartisan Senate intelligence panel, concluding that Moscow mounted a drive to boost Trump.

Trump’s comments followed Gabbard’s release of classified materials that did not support his allegations, say critics. Yet the attorney general, Pam Bondi, then impaneled a grand jury to investigate the charges as Gabbard requested.

Some legal scholars see a pattern with earlier Trump tactics to fudge facts and revise history and warn of the justice department’s marked politicization under Trump and Bondi. The Columbia law professor and ex-federal prosecutor Daniel Richman said: “The announcement of a grand jury investigation into Obama and Biden officials [is] just the latest effort to support a false narrative with the presence of official action.”

From a historical perspective, critics say the Trump administration’s assaults on truth and facts will do long-term damage.

“The United States did not put a man on the moon or invent the transistor, the internet, the polio vaccine, or [on the negative side] the atomic bomb by ignoring or making up facts,” said Gerrard.

“All these achievements resulted from scientists doing the very hard work of discovering truths about the physical world and using them in brilliant ways.

“A country that instead ignores facts it doesn’t like and invents falsities can achieve very little beyond satisfying those who share the leaders’ ideology. We are on a dangerous path to mediocrity, or worse.”