The Damage of ‘Trump Math’ Is Adding Up | NYT Opinion
Video authors/creators: Binyamin Appelbaum and James Robinson
May 15, 2026: "The federal government is, by far, the world’s most important source of data, a fount of statistical information on a wide range of subjects touching almost every aspect of human life. President Trump is trying to break the fountain. This video tells the story of the Trump administration’s war on data — and the consequences for all of us."
This video shows how the Trump administration is destroying essential medical, economic, and social/physical science data banks.
"Accurate and well-reported data is an essential element of a well-functioning democracy. The true victim in the war on numbers isn’t just the data; it’s you."
PARTIAL TRANSCRIPT & VIDEO GIFS
NARRATOR: Authoritarian regimes impose their authority by insisting that people believe things that are obviously not true. The point is that the regime is more powerful than the truth. By going after the data and inventing his own narrative, Trump is following a familiar pattern.
STEP 1: CONTROL/ ALT/ DELETE
NARRATOR: Almost immediately after his inauguration, Trump’s mass deletion campaign began. The government’s 13 core statistical agencies were stymied, losing over 20 percent of their staff, and entire data sets were discontinued. [....]
[See more under the cut.]
STEP 2: PUNISH THE TRUTH TELLERS
NARRATOR: The Trump administration’s deletion campaign has extended beyond removing data sets. He’s also gone after those who report findings he doesn’t like. [....]
STEP 3: MAKE #$o% UP
NARRATOR: By deleting data and punishing the number makers, Trump has cleared the way for his own sort of magic, Trump math, where numbers suddenly fit his political agenda.
NARRATOR: At times the claims are just bizarre, like when Trump claimed he would lower drug prices by
TRUMP: “1,000 percent, 600 percent, numbers that are not even thought to be achievable.” [....]
NARRATOR: Trump wants us to believe his lies, even when they contradict what’s right in front of us.
TRUMP: “Inflation is totally neutralized.” “Prices are way down.” “Grocery prices, energy prices, airfares, mortgage rates, rent and car payments are all coming down, and they’re coming down fast.”
NARRATOR: He’s insisting that these problems are not real and therefore that the government doesn’t need to address them. [....]
This is the opposite of what governments are supposed to do. [....]
NARRATOR: Imagine what could happen if we allow this to continue in the U.S.
Imagine being told that hunger is at an all-time low when lines in your neighborhood go around the block as people line up for food.
NARRATOR: Imagine not being able to access a medication you need because the government withheld the data that showed its effectiveness.
Imagine election officials facing criminal prosecution for announcing the correct results.
NARRATOR: Accurate and well-reported data is an essential element of a well-functioning democracy.
The true victim in the war on numbers isn’t just the data; it’s you.
ICE shift in tactics leads to soaring number of at-large arrests, data shows
The Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign has led to a significant change in strategy, as federal officers shift away from focusing on arresting immigrants already held in local jails to tracking them down on the streets and in communities, according to a Washington Post analysis of government data.
Government spending in north fell £6.3bn while rising by £3.2bn in south, thinktank says
Government spending in the north of England has fallen by £6.3bn while the south-east and south-west of England have seen an increase of £3.2bn since 2009-10, according to an analysis of official figures.
Notice it’s the heavily the non tory voting working class areas that get spending cuts and the tory shires that get spending increases. It’s a class war. And in a place like hull were 79% of the entire council budget comes from government grants, the cuts hit even harder.
No one would blame you for missing the early January introduction of two identical bills known as H.R. 482 and S.103. Sponsored by Rep. Paul Gosar of Arizona and Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, both bills held the distinctly unremarkable title of the “Local Zoning Decisions Protection Act of 2017.”
...But many American geography and mapping professionals as well as fair housing advocates and academic researchers, are sitting up and paying attention. That’s because these bills include language that would actively prevent federal funds from being used to create and maintain geospatial databases covering affordable housing access and racial disparities—cutting off a key source of accessible and easy-to-use information for researchers and communities. (Geospatial data is data that’s associated with a particular geographic location).
....Here’s the language that concerns mapmakers, academics, housing advocates, and many others, taken directly from H.R. 482:
"Notwithstanding any other provision of law, no Federal funds may be used to design, build, maintain, utilize, or provide access to a Federal database of geospatial information on community racial disparities or disparities in access to affordable housing."
....There’s another possible rationale behind these bills: If you don’t collect data on a certain problem, it makes it easier to deny a problem exists at all. “I can’t find a reason for this bill other than to make all these other issues go away,” says Jack Giesking, a cultural geographer and assistant professor at Trinity College in Connecticut. “If you don’t have the data, you can’t prove it. I’ve heard people say ‘it’s not about the data.’ And I agree: It’s not about data, it’s about the fight for justice this supports. And housing and race are linked.”
...This isn’t purely an American phenomenon, either. France likes to view itself as a country with minimal issues with racism and discrimination. It’s hard to contradict this image because the collection of data on race or ethnicity has been illegal in France since 1978.
In the Age of Trump, We Need to Protect Map Databases
Access to information is under threat like never before.
In a Trump administration that has made clear its disdain for the copious evidence that human activity is warming the planet, researchers feared a broad crusade against the scientific information provided to the public.
Reports last week that the administration is proposing deep budget cuts for government agencies including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency have fueled new fears of databases being axed, if only as a cost-saving measure.
Curating reality is an old political game, but Trump’s sweeping statistical purges are part of a broader attempt to reinvent “truth.”
Trump appears to be turning the federal government into its own 1984-style Ministry of Truth.
This is a gift 🎁 link so there is no paywall to read it. Below are some excerpts/highlights.
By Amanda Shendruk and Catherine Rampell | March 11, 2025
The Trump administration is deleting taxpayer-funded data — information that Americans use to make sense of the world. In its absence, the president can paint the world as he pleases.
We don’t know the full universe of statistics that has gone missing, but the U.S. DOGE Service’s wrecking ball has already left behind a wasteland of 404 pages. All sorts of useful information has disappeared, including data on:
[...]
[See more under the cut.]
Three cases of legerdemath and other tricks up Trump’s sleeve
Deleting data isn’t the only way to manipulate official statistics. Trump and his allies have also misrepresented or altered data. Here are a few examples:
1. Incorrect data
Witness DOGE’s bogus statistics on its supposed government savings. The administration counts as “savings” some canceled contracts that had already been paid in full. Some canceled expenses were created out of whole cloth, such as $50 million supposedly spent on sending condoms to Gaza.
2. Misrepresented data
One of Trump’s favorite charts on immigration is riddled with errors. For one, it does not show the number of immigrants entering the United States illegally, as he claims, but the number of people stopped at the U.S. border.
Similarly, when Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick was recently asked how much DOGE funding cuts might reduce economic growth, he suggested that the agency might decide to change how economic growth is calculated so that the usual GDP report strips out government spending altogether. This would be an abrupt change to the standard GDP methodology that has been used around the world for nearly a century, but it would certainly make the DOGE cuts look less painful.
3. Altered data
When data doesn’t tell the story Trump wants, he fabricates it. In what became known as “Sharpiegate,” Trump notoriously altered a map of Hurricane Dorian’s path in 2019.
Likewise, before Jan. 30, a National Institutes of Health website documenting years of spending data included a category called “Workforce Diversity and Outreach.” That line item is now gone — even though the money was, indeed, spent.
Taking cues from authoritarian illusionists
Such actions are straight out of authoritarian leaders’ playbooks.
Research suggests that less democratic countries have been more likely to inflate their GDP growth rates and manipulate their covid-19 numbers. Statistical manipulation is also more common in countries that shun economic openness and democracy.
[...]
To be clear, efforts to rewrite reality via statistical manipulation often don’t work. If anything, China’s data deletions reduced public confidence in the country’s economic stability. (No one hides good news, after all.)
The Trump team’s efforts to suppress nettlesome numbers have similarly eroded trust in U.S. data. Only about one-third of Americans trust that most or all of the statistics Trump cites are “reliable and accurate.”
Meanwhile, missing or untrustworthy data lead to worse decisions: Auto companies, for example, draw on dozens of federally administered datasets when devising new car models, how to price them, where to stock and market them and other key choices. Retailers need detailed information about local demographics, weather and modes of transit when deciding where to locate stores.
Doctors require up-to-date statistics about disease spread when diagnosing or treating patients. Families look at school test scores and local crime rates when deciding where to move. Politicians use census data when determining funding levels for important government programs.
And of course, voters need good data of all kinds when weighing whether to throw the bums out. Many of us take the existence of economic or public health stats for granted, without even thinking about who maintains them or what happens if they go away.
Fortunately, some outside institutions have been saving and archiving endangered federal data. The Internet Archives’ Wayback Machine, for instance, crawls sites around the internet and has become an invaluable resource for seeing what federal websites used to contain. Other organizations are archiving topic-specific data and research, such as on the environment or reproductive health.
These are critical but ultimately insufficient efforts. At best, they can preserve data already published. But they cannot update series already halted or purged.... Some private companies may step in to offer their own substitutes (on prices, for example), but private companies still rely on government statistics to calibrate their own numbers. Much of the most critical information about the state of our union can be collected only by the state itself.
Americans might be stuck with whatever Trump chooses to share with us, or not.
