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.
A golden tray sits on the Resolute Desk as President Donald Trump speaks during an announcement on American nuclear innovation in the Oval Office at the White House on July 24, 2026, in Washington, D.C. Trump is signing multiple executive orders targeting the nuclear energy sector and easing rules for new reactors and nuclear fuel supply chains.
Trump’s hubris rivals the fallen heroes of ancient Greek mythology
In January, the New York Times asked President Donald Trump if there were any limits on his global powers.
“Yeah,” the president responded, “there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
That was eight months ago, but fortunately Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster adaptation of “The Odyssey” has made ancient Greek literature newly relevant. Before that window closes, I’d like to talk about hubris.
Today, the term mostly means excessive pride or arrogance. That’s part of what the Greeks meant by it too, but the meaning was a bit richer and more specific. Hubris was an insolent or outrageous act that offended the gods, often because the transgressor was claiming abilities or authorities that solely belonged to supreme beings.
Nolan renamed and slightly modified the concept of xenia for the film, calling it “Zeus’ law.” In the director’s telling, mortals should follow the rules laid out by the gods, specifically the requirement to treat strangers with respect lest they be gods in disguise.
In a sense, hubris is the opposite, or at least the rejection, of xenia. The hubris of the suitors, and at times Odysseus himself, invites punishment by the gods and their mortal instruments.
Which brings me back to Donald Trump. His claim that there are no constraints on his personal power to dictate events on the global stage was one of the greatest expressions of hubris ever uttered by a political leader.
Trump’s claim was obviously false when he made it.
He vowed that he could end the Russia-Ukraine war in 24 hours. He’s proved powerless to make that happen. If he had divine powers to work his will, why would he have balked at implementing his tariffs so often that Wall Street adopted the “TACO trade” term for his deals? “TACO” stands for “Trump always chickens out.”
And why would Trump have made so many embarrassing concessions to China — from rescinding tariffs on Chinese goods to allowing them to buy crucial and incredibly valuable computer chips?
But Trump saw his success at capturing Venezuelan strongman Nicolas Maduro as proof of his ability to launch missiles to the same effect as Zeus’ lightning bolts. Trump believed he was the most powerful man who ever lived.
This is no exaggeration. In March, when the Iran invasion seemed successful, Trump gave a document penned by“Presidential Historian David King” to New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan purporting to prove that Trump was “the most powerful person to have EVER walked this planet.” King was, in fact, a businessman and occasional caddy for legendary golfer Gary Player.
King compared Trump favorably to many of history’s most powerful, and often heinous, figures: Alexander the Great, Attila the Hun, William the Conqueror, Napoleon Bonaparte, Joseph Stalin, Genghis Khan, Mao Tse Tung, Adolf Hitler and Vladimir Lenin. Many of these men thought they were the most powerful person in the world, too. And many were defeated precisely because they believed it.
At least Napoleon and Hitler had a string of truly impressive victories before they learned the folly of hubris. The limits on Trump’s power have been exposed by far less august forces than the combined might of the allies in World War II or the fearsome Russian winter.
Iran is a comparatively middling power. But the regime’s ability to absorb punishment while imposing its will on the Strait of Hormuz has proved to be a greater constraint on Trump’s power than his morality or mind. We should note that, at least rhetorically, his morality has not proved much of a constraint. He has repeatedly promised to destroy Iranian “civilization” if the regime refuses to capitulate.
But they haven’t — and won’t anytime soon — because the regime’s tolerance for pain far outstrips Trump’s. The combined fear of skyrocketing oil prices, outrage of Gulf state potentates, diminishing weapon supplies and domestic unpopularity is doing the work that international law, congressional oversight and the collective opinion of foreign policy experts can’t or won’t do.
If I considered Trump more heroic than reason and facts could allow, I would say his Sisyphean predicament has the whiff of Greek tragedy to it. Trump is vexed by the fact that the Iranians won’t honor deals or ratify his countless premature claims of victory — giving new meaning to his vow that his presidency would make people tired of winning. It’s almost like they’re out-Trumping Trump.
Things might have gone better if he’d heeded that great Greek tragedian Sophocles: “For Zeus utterly abhors the boasts of a proud tongue.”
____
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.