Say Goodbye to Truth as We Know It If Trump and Vance Win
We’ll miss government facts and science when they’re gone.
AS HURRICANE HELENE RACED TOWARD FLORIDA last week, the Miami Herald seized a dramatic opportunity to remind readers that “we live and die—sometimes literally” by information from the National Hurricane Center and National Weather Service. And when you’re trying to figure out whether to leave or stay, whether schools are open or closed, “how much food and gas to buy to survive,” the editorial board wrote, you obviously need “the best, most trustworthy information” possible.
The federal government—in this case, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, which oversees those two agencies—has long been that best, most reliable source of information on countless subjects, including weather. “And yet, according to Project 2025—a document hundreds of pages long that lays out a policy agenda and 180-day playbook if the GOP wins the White House—NOAA needs to go,” the editorial said.
It was a striking way to lay out the stakes of a second Trump administration, this time on steroids with JD Vance on board to hasten the end of truth as we know it. And it came the same day Kamala Harris made clear that she is rooted in reality.
“I promise you, I will be pragmatic in my approach,” Harris said in an economic speech in Pittsburgh last Wednesday. “I believe we shouldn’t be constrained by ideology and, instead, should seek practical solutions to problems, realistic assessments of what is working and what is not, applying metrics to our analysis, applying facts to our analysis.”
Donald Trump is allergic to facts and analysis, whether on the campaign trail or in the Oval Office. Maybe people have forgotten how disorienting it was to constantly hear irrational nonsense from the president. Somehow that is not disqualifying for tens of millions of voters. Please, let’s not forget.
In his final year, as the COVID pandemic erupted, Trump’s fake news and musings ranged from farcical (doses of sunlight, injections of bleach) to outrageous (“I don’t need to have the [case] numbers double because of one cruise ship that wasn’t our fault”) to tragic (dismantling pandemic response infrastructure, minimizing the crisis, pitting states against each other, and sending mixed messages on masks and vaccines).
And that was just COVID. After Helene’s devastation, it’s hard not to think of Trump gaslighting the country in 2019 by holding up a National Hurricane Center map altered with a Sharpie to support his false statements about the expected path of Hurricane Dorian. A small incident, it might seem—comical even, except that he undermined government weather scientists, triggered backlash against them, and spread false information that could have had very concrete consequences for the Americans being misled.
The attacks on government sources of scientific information began right after Trump took office. Four days after his inauguration, the new administration “instructed the Environmental Protection Agency to remove the climate change page from its website,” Reuters reported at the time. In Trump’s first year, a January 2018 study found, thousands of climate web pages were erased or obscured at agencies across the government. Alarmed scientists had mobilized during the 2016 transition to document the anticipated damage and save endangered government data.
A 2022 research paper concluded the Trump administration had “regularly suppressed, downplayed, or simply ignored scientific research demonstrating the need for regulation to protect public health and the environment.” The authors compiled a lengthy and far-flung catalogue, from firings to hiding information, drawn from the Silencing Science Tracker database. “Anti-science behavior” was documented at twenty-three federal agencies, they said, even in unexpected places like the Justice Department and Federal Communications Commission.
The Trump team also tried to manipulate the U.S. Census for political gain, threatening the integrity of the constitutionally mandated population count used to determine House seats, electoral votes and the distribution of $1.5 trillion in federal funds. A plan to speed up and cut short the pandemic-era 2020 count drew headlines and a lawsuit, as well as an inspector general’s warning that the Trump plan “poses a myriad of risks to accuracy and completeness.”
Even more troubling, Trump and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross wanted state-by-state counts of undocumented immigrants in order to exclude them as a factor in drawing new House districts. Top Census civil servants said the changes created privacy risks and violated the Fourteenth Amendment instruction to count “the whole number” of people in each state. They called the administration’s “engagement” in methodology unprecedented and inappropriate for “an independent statistical agency.”
TRUMP DIDN’T GET TOO FAR WITH THE CENSUS, thank goodness. But the scale of disruption and interference in general would be infinitely larger under Trump with Vance by his side. Both of them have talked of replacing 50,000 civil servants, maybe even more, with ideological disciples. The workforce would follow the leaders and their active contempt for facts and common sense.
Vance is already in the same league as Trump when it comes to world-class lies and misinformation. He has already caused real-world harm, just like Trump did with COVID and on January 6th, with his incessant, intentional lies about Haitian immigrants stealing and eating pets. And just as Trump spins absurd tales of America as a dystopian nightmare, Vance is creating his own dystopian fantasy about America’s public schools.
Just the other day, a well-known Christian nationalist interviewed Vance at a “Courage Tour” event near Pittsburgh. (I didn’t believe it at first, but folks, this really happened.) Among the many fact-free things Vance said was this: “We’ve got American children who can’t add 5 plus 5, but they can tell you that there are 87 different genders.” He blamed “creeping socialism in our schools. We’ve gotta get it out of there and I think we cut off the money—stop spending your tax dollars on radical organizations that are poisoning the minds of our kids.”
Who wants to defund public schools? Practically nobody. Only 8 percent of adults in a recent poll said they’d be most likely to support a political candidate who wanted to cut public school funding. But Vance will keep using words like “radical” and “poison” and “socialism,” and insisting students can’t read, write or do math, to justify eliminating the U.S. Department of Education and starving public schools of resources.
Trump’s White House tenure was highly disconcerting for journalists and everyone else who depended on government data. Government information was the gold standard, whether you wanted to know how many people died in a war or what to wear the next day. And then, suddenly, web pages would be blank. Information had vanished. Trend lines could not be determined. Transcripts sometimes didn’t match what you heard, or what was said.
We should be able to count on our government for facts and truth. But it’s a true and frightening fact that we won’t be able to if Trump and Vance win.
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