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.
Eric Trump, the newly appointed ALT5 board director of World Liberty Financial, walks outside of the NASDAQ in Times Square as they mark the $1.5- billion partnership between World Liberty Financial and ALT5 Sigma with the ringing of the NASDAQ opening bell, on Aug. 13, 2025, in New York City.
Why does the Trump family always get a pass?
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche joined ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday to defend or explain a lot of controversies for the Trump administration: the Epstein files release, the events in Minneapolis, etc. He was also asked about possible conflicts of interest between President Trump’s family business and his job. Specifically, Blanche was asked about a very sketchy deal Trump’s son Eric signed with the UAE’s national security adviser, Sheikh Tahnoon.
Shortly before Trump was inaugurated in early 2025, Tahnoon invested $500 million in the Trump-owned World Liberty, a then newly launched cryptocurrency outfit. A few months later, UAE was granted permission to purchase sensitive American AI chips. According to the Wall Street Journal, which broke the story, “the deal marks something unprecedented in American politics: a foreign government official taking a major ownership stake in an incoming U.S. president’s company.”
“How do you respond to those who say this is a serious conflict of interest?” ABC host George Stephanopoulos asked.
“I love it when these papers talk about something being unprecedented or never happening before,” Blanche replied, “as if the Biden family and the Biden administration didn’t do exactly the same thing, and they were just in office.”
Blanche went on to boast about how the president is utterly transparent regarding his questionable business practices: “I don’t have a comment on it beyond Trump has been completely transparent when his family travels for business reasons. They don’t do so in secret. We don’t learn about it when we find a laptop a few years later. We learn about it when it’s happening.”
Sadly, Stephanopoulos didn’t offer the obvious response, which may have gone something like this: “OK, but the president and countless leading Republicans insisted that President Biden was the head of what they dubbed ‘the Biden Crime family’ and insisted his business dealings were corrupt, and indeed that his corruption merited impeachment. So how is being ‘transparent’ about similar corruption a defense?”
Now, I should be clear that I do think the Biden family’s business dealings were corrupt, whether or not laws were broken. Others disagree. I also think Trump’s business dealings appear to be worse in many ways than even what Biden was alleged to have done. But none of that is relevant. The standard set by Trump and Republicans is the relevant political standard, and by the deputy attorney general’s own account, the Trump administration is doing “exactly the same thing,” just more openly.
Since when is being more transparent about wrongdoing a defense? Try telling a cop or judge, “Yes, I robbed that bank. I’ve been completely transparent about that. So, what’s the big deal?”
This is just a small example of the broader dysfunction in the way we talk about politics.
Americans have a special hatred for hypocrisy. I think it goes back to the founding era. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed in “Democracy In America,” the old world had a different way of dealing with the moral shortcomings of leaders. Rank had its privileges. Nobles, never mind kings, were entitled to behave in ways that were forbidden to the little people.
In America, titles of nobility were banned in the Constitution and in our democratic culture. In a society built on notions of equality (the obvious exceptions of Black people, women, Native Americans notwithstanding) no one has access to special carve-outs or exemptions as to what is right and wrong. Claiming them, particularly in secret, feels like a betrayal against the whole idea of equality.
The problem in the modern era is that elites — of all ideological stripes — have violated that bargain. The result isn’t that we’ve abandoned any notion of right and wrong. Instead, by elevating hypocrisy to the greatest of sins, we end up weaponizing the principles, using them as a cudgel against the other side but not against our own.
Pick an issue: violent rhetoric by politicians, sexual misconduct, corruption and so on. With every revelation, almost immediately the debate becomes a riot of whataboutism. Team A says that Team B has no right to criticize because they did the same thing. Team B points out that Team A has switched positions. Everyone has a point. And everyone is missing the point.
Sure, hypocrisy is a moral failing, and partisan inconsistency is an intellectual one. But neither changes the objective facts. This is something you’re supposed to learn as a child: It doesn’t matter what everyone else is doing or saying, wrong is wrong. It’s also something lawyers like Mr. Blanche are supposed to know. Telling a judge that the hypocrisy of the prosecutor — or your client’s transparency — means your client did nothing wrong would earn you nothing but a laugh.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.