You know the old philosophical question: “If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?”
Well, in President Trump’s America, the answer would depend on whether or not he wanted it to.
In a world where the only “truth” is found on Trump’s Truth Social, the only “facts” are alternative ones, and the only useful “theories” are conspiracy ones, there might not even be a tree. Or a forest. Or a sound.
This is the “reality” we’re all living in now: the president of the United States, long a fan of invention and propaganda, has co-opted and corrupted data, science, math, research, intelligence and facts for the purposes of presenting only what he wants to be seen.
On Friday, Trump fired Erika McEntarfer, a little-known statistician at the Bureau of Labor Statistics who until then had overseen the tabulation of the monthly jobs report. Not because her numbers were wrong, but because he didn’t like them, a fact he made clear in a Truth Social post later that day.
“In my opinion, today’s Jobs Numbers were RIGGED in order to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad.”
Of course, there’s zero evidence that the July jobs numbers were “RIGGED,” nor that McEntarfer was performing some kind of mathematical voodoo on them to undercut Trump. In fact, Trump loved the job she was doing just a month earlier. “GREAT JOBS NUMBERS, STOCK MARKET UP BIG! AT THE SAME TIME, BILLIONS POURING IN FROM TARIFFS!!!” he posted in June.
McEntarfer, of course, didn’t invent the jobs numbers. She merely calculated them. So this is a little like firing Isaac Newton for discovering gravity — apples fall off trees whether he wrote the law of universal gravitation or not.
This wasn’t the first time Trump’s attempted to proverbially shoot the messenger for saying things he didn’t like. It wasn’t even the first time this week.
On Tuesday, NPR reported that Trump ordered NASA to end two satellite missions that produce data on climate change and greenhouse gases — data that’s used not only by climatologists, but weather agencies, oil and gas companies, the Department of Agriculture, and farmers to measure carbon dioxide, plant growth, crop yield, drought conditions, and more.
Destroying these satellites and the data they produce won’t make the data any less real or important. But in Trump’s mind, I guess, if we can’t see it, it isn’t happening.
Last month, the Smithsonian removed references to Trump’s two impeachments from an exhibit at the National Museum of American History following pressure from the White House to remove an art museum director.
Back in January of 2017, he called the acting director of the National Park Service the day after he was inaugurated over a tweet the agency shared comparing his inauguration crowd size to another larger one. He reportedly asked him to share photographic evidence that his crowd was bigger than what the media was reporting, and the tweet he NPS originally shared was later removed.
In 2019, someone, presumably at Trump’s direction, comically altered a National Hurricane Center map with a Sharpie to reflect Trump’s incorrect predictions for the path of Hurricane Dorian. Trump had insisted it would hit Alabama, contradicting weather forecasts that said it wouldn’t, and then provided the clearly altered map as evidence he was right about its trajectory, even after Dorian spared Alabama and moved up the Atlantic coast. Science be damned.
This kind of data delusion and fact fiction is, on the one hand, very sad, the mark of a man too fragile, impotent and incompetent to accept reality or withstand criticism.
But it’s also self-sabotaging. Leaders who favor propaganda and lies over truth and facts not only intentionally mislead the public and distort reality, they undermine trust in every institution, including and eventually ones they may even need people to believe in.
We’re seeing this now with the Jeffrey Epstein conspiracy. After spending years pushing baseless theories about the dead child sex offender, the Trump administration now wants MAGA voters to believe there’s nothing to see there. The problem? The institutions saying there’s nothing to see there — the FBI and the Justice Department — are ones that Trump and MAGA have previously insisted cannot be believed.
Regardless of Trump’s philosophy that truth is malleable and facts are politically subjective, I promise you, a real world does exist — and in that real world, the July jobs numbers were bad, climate change is real, he was impeached, the 2020 election wasn’t stolen, and all kinds of other inconvenient truths persist.
Just don’t tell him that.
S.E. Cupp is the host of "S.E. Cupp Unfiltered" on CNN.
To Trump, ‘Truth’ Is Only What He Wants It Be was originally published by the Tribune Content Agency and is republished with permission.
Americans across the political spectrum have continued to ask about the late financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s connections among the political elite. (Angela Weiss/AFP)
A view of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., on June 25, 2026. President Donald Trump jolted Republicans during a fiery appearance at the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday, scrapping a housing bill signing ceremony and clashing behind closed doors with a party rebel who challenged him over the Iran war. Trump had been expected to sign the bipartisan housing.
Only Trump doesn’t care about housing
It was August 15, 2024. Then candidate Donald Trump stepped out of his Bedminster, New Jersey, golf club’s columned clubhouse to a gaggle of reporters. He was flanked by tables of groceries and signs showing the rising cost of food. Also on one of the tables was a dollhouse, meant to represent the equally alarming rise in housing prices.
It was a speech about the economy, the single most important issue of the 2024 election cycle, full of promises that went right to the heart of Americans’ anxieties. While former President Joe Biden and then Vice President Kamala Harris were contorting themselves to posture a good economy that just needed more time to recover from the pandemic, Trump was preying on voters’ very real fears of unaffordable gas, groceries, and homes. It was obviously a winning message.
In that speech, Trump promised, “We’re going to open up tracts of federal land for housing construction. We desperately need housing for people who can’t afford what’s going on now.”
As of mid-2023, there had been a housing shortage of nearly four million homes, according to the National Association of Realtors. Americans all over the country were either priced out of buying new homes due to low inventory, trapped in their existing homes by sky-high mortgage rates, or facing exorbitant rent hikes thanks to corporate investors buying up rental properties. Americans needed help, and Trump promised it.
Cut to March of 2026, when Trump reportedly told House Speaker Mike Johnson, “No one gives a sh*t about housing.”
That kind of thinking may explain why Trump this week suddenly announced he was canceling a signing ceremony for the bipartisan “21st Century ROAD to Housing Act,” a housing bill co-sponsored by Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Tim Scott that passed the House 358-32 and was approved in the Senate on Monday.
Trump instead demanded Congress pass the SAVE America Act, his controversial election grievance bill that doesn’t have enough Republican support to get passed in the Senate.
It’s just the latest in a line of policy self-owns where Trump has seemingly intentionally made life more difficult for Republicans hoping to keep their majority. Despite midterm elections occurring in the midst of a blistering economy and an unpopular war, they were surely hoping the housing bill would give them something — anything — to brag about when they returned home to their districts.
And very much to the contrary, Americans do give a sh*t about housing. According to a recent survey by the Bipartisan Policy Center, a whopping 79% say the cost of housing is extremely or very important to them. Eighty-three percent say Congress should take action on the issue — like it just did. Eighty-nine percent say the House and Senate need to work together to pass affordable housing legislation — like they just did. And 63% say they would be more likely to vote for a lawmaker if they helped pass legislation to build more affordable homes and lower housing costs — like they just did.
There aren’t many issues that unite Americans like housing does, and very few bipartisan policy wins Congress can point to, and yet, Trump is holding that bill hostage in order to get his pet project — which doesn’t even have the support of his own party — pushed through.
If you’re trying to make sense of something so nonsensical, as I’m sure many Republican lawmakers are, it’s certainly sad but not actually all that complicated. Trump said what he needed to get reelected and then promptly abandoned his promises in order to pursue his own self-interests, even if those interests are bad for Republicans and bad for voters.
That’s just the kind of guy he is.
S.E. Cupp is the host of "S.E. Cupp Unfiltered" on CNN.