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Trump Is Attacking Our Ability to Find Out What Is Going On in Our Country
Erosion of the ability to accurately describe our reality hobbles every aspect of our collective decision-making. The current program of erosion is steady, deliberate, and already well underway.
Aug 28, 2025
Alarms are sounding across the political and ideological spectrums about America’s collapsing federal data structure. But what is the big deal? Why does access to data, specifically from the federal government, matter so much?
At the heart of all work in this space are three questions:
- What happened before?
- What is happening now?
- What might happen?
A society cannot make good decisions without knowing how prior decisions turned out, assessing the current situation, and developing reasonable predictions about possibilities under consideration.
Federal statistical work is how we find out what is going on with the 300 million people and 11 million businesses across the complex network of federal, state, and local systems that make up the world’s largest economy. Issues at that scale are too big for intuition or “common sense.” We need comprehensive information produced by rigorous, capable people who are not afraid to tell us the truth. We should be deeply and profoundly alarmed by the offer of anything less.
Each researcher approaches their work from a different direction with a different area of focus, which results in a wide range of conclusions on a variety of topics. But the common ground is the data.
Voters are beginning to understand the damage our economy and our society sustains when we turn our backs on the truth.
Reliable, comprehensive, nonpartisan federal datasets like the American Community Survey from the Census Bureau, historical data tables from Internal Revenue Service Statistics of Income, economic reports from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, scoring from the Joint Committee on Taxation, estimates from the Congressional Budget Office, and other quality federal data products provide a stable point of reference to which most agree to calibrate their work, even though there may be different policy perspectives. We know we are all standing on the same ground, and that the ground is reasonably solid.
Until now, these data have been produced by teams of dedicated experts who understand that their job is to collect and report the numbers as accurately as possible. Sometimes the best available methods are imperfect. Sometimes estimates need adjustment based on the latest information. Sometimes the team responsible for a particular report does not have the ideal amount of funding or enough staff. But the reports have always been created in good faith by extremely competent people. The current threats to that are inexcusable.
Erosion of the ability to accurately describe our reality hobbles every aspect of our collective decision-making. The current program of erosion is steady, deliberate, and already well underway.
Statistical agencies have been aggressively hollowed out in terms of both funding and staff and are notifying the research community to expect certain products to be released late or not at all. Important research programs are suspended indefinitely.
Information on entire subjects—such as race, gender, and climate—is no longer being collected and, in some cases, being excised wholesale from existing data. Legislators are arguing that publicly traded corporations should not have to disclose critical information about their activities. Careful, diligent staffers are losing their positions for doing their jobs and, if replaced at all, being replaced by people who think good data science begins and ends with typing a prompt into a chatbot.
Highly qualified leaders defending data integrity, privacy, and the mission of their agencies are being kicked to the curb in favor of individuals whose primary qualification appears to be willingness to produce reports that say whatever the current administration wants and suppress those that do not.
The ability to find out what is going on in our country is under attack. That is definitely a big deal, but the research community is not taking it lying down. The authoritarian playbook always includes attacking the truth, so this did not come as a surprise. As soon as the 2024 election results were called, data preservation coalitions got to work archiving existing data in multiple locations. The agency leaders are not going easily or quietly. And voters are beginning to understand the damage our economy and our society sustains when we turn our backs on the truth. American civil resistance has a proud history, and this assault on our public information is an opportunity for involved citizens to prevent authoritarianism from taking hold.
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History is the Front Line in the Struggle for Democracy
As the accumulation of executive orders since Trump’s inauguration manifestly shows, the fate of history in America is a bellwether for the future of democracy itself.
Aug 25, 2025
If you are looking for the front lines in the struggle over our democracy, you can find them in the executive orders which brazenly seize control of history, among other things, in the name of American greatness.
If you haven’t read those EOs, it’s your civic duty to do so. Because if you want to grasp how high the stakes are and ready yourself for the battles ahead, you have to acknowledge how utterly entwined the future of our democratic polity is with the fate of history in the US today.
During the period between March and August of this year, the current administration issued a number of EOs that take direct aim at the teaching, content, and memorializing of the American past, with particular attention to those subjects which are now deemed “NSFW” in classrooms from elementary school through university.
There are also EOs which indirectly disqualify or ignore longstanding histories of climate change, inequality, racial injustice, and sexual freedom in order to make way for MAGA policies which turn the clock back decades or more, eroding the cultural, economic, social, and political foundations of American democracy.
Will we come to see an executive order that declares a crime emergency for History capital H for failing to promote narratives of America the Beautiful not just as absolute truth and sanity but as the highest form of muscular Christian patriotism?
Take for example, the March 27, 2025 EO, which declared that an insane, untruthful version of the past has beset narratives of American history through the promotion of race as something other than a biological fact in sculptures at the Smithsonian and through the public memorials which decry white supremacy rather than celebrating it.
Or the April 8, 2025 EO, which effectively sidelines three decades and more of historical research on the environmental and human costs of American fossil fuel production in order to champion US coal as “beautiful,” “abundant,” useable “in any weather condition,” and worth a trillion dollars.
Or the EO issued two weeks later which rewrites history and declares that accreditation agencies in the higher education space are nothing more or less than fruit from the poisoned diversity, equity, and inclusion tree and hence constitute abuse of governance standards in violation of federal law.
Issued on that same day is the EO which conveniently ignores histories of racial discrimination at the site of education, housing, employment, and other civic opportunities, declaring that all policies that flow therefrom are rendered null and void in the interests of restoring meritocracy.
Of particular note, as debates about AI rage their way across the globe, is the EO of July 23, 2025, which suggests that historical knowledge of and teaching about American racism and the oppression of people of color have infiltrated AI to such a degree that “one major AI model changed the race or sex of historical figures—including the Pope, the Founding Fathers, and Vikings—when prompted for images because it was trained to prioritize DEI requirements at the cost of accuracy [and] another AI model refused to produce images celebrating the achievements of white people, even while complying with the same request for people of other races.”
As is evident from that quote, these EOs have to be read to be believed.
Yet we cannot afford to look away.
As recently as August 7, the administration issued an EO that deemed activities (like history) that address racism, challenge the sex binary in humans, or debate the notion that sex is a chosen or mutable characteristic promote “anti-American values.”
Ominously for colleges and universities, the EO in which that declaration is embedded is entitled “Improving Oversight of Federal Grant Making.” Which means that knowledge of the kind produced by historians that is deemed a form of anti-Americanism may be part of a litmus test for the flow of federal grant dollars to STEM and other fields.
To be sure, histories of the African American experience, gender difference and equity, and social justice politics or movements have been under threat at the state level for years.
The promulgation of bills outlawing the teaching of everything from slavery to socialism in over half the states since 2022 has put history under a metaphorical house arrest.
But the EOs of 2025 so far are heading toward the quasi-legal equivalent of suspending habeas corpus for the practice of professional history--i.e., taking it into federal custody with no credible explanation of the arbitrary detention of its research and teaching in anything like a court of law.
And although it may not appear to be related, the declaration of “a crime emergency” authorizing the executive authority to militarize the DC police force should prompt us to think about the relationship between “history detained” and the specter of martial law.
And it looks like Chicago is next.
Will we come to see an executive order that declares a crime emergency for History capital H for failing to promote narratives of America the Beautiful not just as absolute truth and sanity but as the highest form of muscular Christian patriotism?
One that will subject history in America to the will and whim of the Department of Justice and Homeland Security?
Surely this metaphor can only work in the theater of the absurd. Or in the political theater of authoritarianism.
Meanwhile, the content and teaching of history are being caught up in the current logics of what warrants a declaration of emergency.
As the accumulation of executive orders since the inauguration manifestly shows, the fate of history in America is a bellwether for the future of democracy itself. The writer and civil rights activist James Baldwin said it best:
...all that can save you now is your confrontation with your own history... Your history has led you to this moment, and you can only begin to change yourself and save yourself by looking at what you are doing in the name of your history.
If Baldwin is right, it’s because history is neither red or blue; nor is it only about the past itself. History at its most democratizing is a provocation to reckon with the relationship between the past we’ve lived and the futures we want.
Sound the alarm: Martial law may well be next for history. And if it comes, it won’t stop at metaphor.
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Trump Uses King’s Legacy as a Distraction at Best and a Target at Worst
When Trump released the MLK FBI files, privacy concerns and an ideological assault on King’s memory had little meaning for Trump as he tried to escape his Epstein crisis by any means necessary.
Aug 18, 2025
On January 20, Donald Trump returned to the Oval Office with—at least in his mind—an aura of invincibility. A fully compliant Congress was controlled by Republicans who were, in turn, controlled by him. Conservative justices, three of whom he had appointed, dominated the Supreme Court. The defeated opposition, the Democratic Party, seemed distinctly befuddled and weak.
Trump then smashed and bullied his way through his first 100 days, ruling via dictator-like decrees—executive orders—and carrying out retribution at every turn. Democracy’s redlines were crossed daily, and his MAGA base remained passionately loyal even as the rest of the nation soured watching him do little to make the country better.
However, his “realignment” was never faintly as broad or as solid as he pretended it was. For example, while he made gains with Black voters in the 2024 election, rising from 8% in 2020 to 15%, the last six months have seen a dramatic change in that support. In January 2025, according to a YouGov poll, Black Americans’ disapproval of Trump was at about 69%. By June, it had risen to about 85%. Through it all, however, his support among Republicans continued to hover between 88% and 95%.
Then, of course, came the Jeffrey Epstein crisis. Trump himself seeded conspiracies surrounding the dead pedophile and his accomplices at rallies and in social media postings. He minimized his 20-year friendship with both Epstein and his girlfriend (and convicted child trafficker) Ghislaine Maxwell, who is serving a 20-year sentence for her part in their horrific crimes. Trump, Attorney General Pam Bondi, and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Director Kash Patel each claimed at some point to have evidence that would expose a “deep-state” cover-up in the case, while bizarre stories of global pedophile rings led by Democrats animated MAGA as much as Trump’s “build the wall” dreams.
The MAGA faithful were waiting for the deliverable. Trump, however, found himself trapped, knowing that he’s part of whatever materials exist and that he will not look good (whether he did anything illegal or not) if the Epstein files are actually released. His constantly changing excuses have spread dissent among his own worshipers and led a panicked Trump to throw out any shiny objects he could think of to change the subject.
Pay Attention to the Shiny Object Over There
On July 21, as part of his Epstein Distraction Campaign, Trump released more than 230,000 pages of FBI and government files related to Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination on April 4, 1968. The more than 6,000 files include FBI documents related to the killing, most of which are not new, according to experts who have reviewed them. They do not, however, include the agency’s nefarious wiretaps of King that are scheduled for release in 2027. There was, of course, neither rhyme nor reason to Trump’s dispersal of those files at that moment.
The president’s claim was that he was keeping a promise he had made when he returned to the White House in January. Within a few days of being in office, on January 23, Trump issued Executive Order 14176 with instructions for the declassification and release of files related to the assassinations of King, John F. Kennedy, and Robert Kennedy. It was a feint at transparency meant to feed the anti-federalist conspiracists in his base. For decades, a cadre of Americans has believed that there was a government-backed cover-up of those killings. In the modern era, the “deep-state” adherents of MAGA world and online extremists have indeed kept those fantasies circulating.
Martin Luther King III and Bernice King, the surviving King children, were advised of the release and opposed it. They then issued a statement that read in part, “While we support transparency and historical accountability, we object to any attacks on our father’s legacy or attempts to weaponize it to spread falsehoods. We strongly condemn any attempts to misuse these documents in ways intended to undermine our father’s legacy and the significant achievements of the movement.” Bernice would later post on social media, “Now, do the Epstein files,” making it clear that she was not fooled by Trump’s flaccid bait-and-switch game. Of course, privacy concerns and an ideological assault on their father and his legacy have little meaning for Trump as he tries to escape his Epstein crisis by any means necessary.
The president’s efforts to roll back the 20th century and overthrow everything King stood for have helped him forge allies with some of the most extreme elements in the nation.
What the King family, scholars, and followers of Martin Luther King Jr.’s legacy are legitimately worried about is that the content of those files may serve to reenergize the long and shameful history of the FBI’s attacks on the late civil rights leader. Under the dictatorial rule of then-FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, the agency surveilled, wiretapped, and harassed King and other Black leaders relentlessly during his lifetime.
It was the FBI that tried to convince King to commit suicide. It was the FBI that sent information to news outlets accusing King of being controlled by communists. It was the FBI that fostered conflicts and divisions both among Black activists and between the civil rights Movement and white allies. Accusations of womanizing were issued to newspapers to embarrass and discredit King. The purpose, as clear as a bell, was to destroy him, his leadership, and the movement.
More broadly, the FBI’s Cointelpro (counter-intelligence program), which officially lasted from 1956 to 1971, sought to annihilate movements for justice, fairness, democracy, peace, and inclusion in the 1950s and beyond. Lives were ruined and campaigns suffered setbacks for exercising legitimate and constitutionally protected free speech and protest rights. Despite the exposure of its many, many crimes, for the most part, neither the FBI nor Hoover were held accountable for what they had done. Hoover, in fact, died of a heart attack while still director in May 1972.
Investigations by scholars and even Congress have since uncovered a wide range of illegal and unethical behavior by the federal government as it sought to disrupt and destroy the civil rights and other movements of the period. It would be decades, however, before the FBI itself offered anything close to an apology, let alone any effort to repair the carnage it had wrought.
When James Comey assumed the role of FBI director in 2013, he made a bit of a mea culpa. In his inaugural speech, he called the agency’s treatment of King “abuse and overreach,” an appropriate (if exceedingly mild) acknowledgement and rebuke of its deplorable and criminal conduct toward him and other racial and social justice activists. And as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) noted in “Unleashed and Unaccountable, The FBI’s Unchecked Abuse of Authority,” a report released at that time, the agency’s violations of rights were then still continuing, particularly against people of color, immigrants, and Muslims.
The current FBI director, Trump loyalist, and true believer Kash Patel is seen as anything but a friend of civil rights and civil liberties. Besides being unqualified for the job, having never served in a serious senior law enforcement position, he’s an election denier and an advocate of Trump’s desire for retribution against his perceived enemies. Prior to becoming FBI director, he had published his own enemies list. His nomination as director was denounced by the ACLU, the NAACP, the National Organization for Women, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and many other civil rights and civil liberties organizations.
With Trump’s blessing (essentially orders), Patel began purging the FBI of agents and investigators who had worked successfully on cases involving the pro-Trump January 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol and others simply seen as not sufficiently MAGA or supplicant enough to the president. His job is to crush the bureau as part of a Trumpian revenge fantasy, while weaponizing its authority for political purposes. If there is information in the released King documents that might embarrass the FBI, so be it. But there is little doubt that the Epstein files, which could actually put Trump in a compromised position, even though his name has reportedly been redacted in them, will never see the light of day.
Whatever may or may not be in the files Trump did release, it’s a stretch to believe that his concern in releasing them had anything to do with truth and openness regarding what happened to King or the Kennedys, rather than a distraction from his own situation. In fact, Trump has failed to criticize in any fashion the MAGA supporters who have been on an anti-King rampage in recent years. His feral sense of survival tells him that King is too much of an icon to go directly after him, while quoting him on occasion is a way, however superficial, of trying to win more Black support.
King Under Far-Right Attack
It’s been quite a different matter for other significant MAGA figures. In such an anti-diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), anti-woke era, Trump-loving far-right activists have, in fact, repeatedly and viciously attacked King. Typically, for instance, in December 2023, Charlie Kirk, founder of the far-right Turning Point USA (TPUSA) and frequently seen with Trump, insisted that King’s reputation was overblown and that he was “awful” and “not a good person.” In particular, he called the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act (CRA), the result of one of King’s most significant and defining campaigns and a giant step forward for the nation, a “huge mistake.” In his view, the CRA established a “permanent DEI-type bureaucracy,” a perspective that perfectly fits Trump’s ongoing blitzkrieg against all the accomplishments of the civil rights and racial justice movements.
Nor is Kirk faintly alone. Other TPUSA associates and allies have joined his crusade. Far-right activist Blake Neff, an associate of Kirk, typically has accused King of not really being a “peaceful activist,” but actually advocating for an activism that became “a very violent thing.” Naturally, Neff provided no evidence to back up such an assertion.
Yet another TPUSA spokesperson, Andrew Kolvet, has also fed such attacks. In an email, for instance, he wrote: “A core part of this fake history of America is the elevation of MLK into a saint, whose entire being is beyond reproach and above question. This sanctified version of MLK strips away his actual views and ignores his actual actions.”
In the past, like many conservatives, including Trump, they also sometimes misappropriated King’s words to attempt to deradicalize him. Kirk used to refer to him as a “hero” and the TPUSA website sold a T-shirt with King’s name and stickers that had King saying, “Let freedom ring.” But that was yesteryear.
Some Black MAGA personalities pushed back against Kirk, including Reverend Darrell Scott, who called him “an a-hole” and “a racist.” Scott was a high-profile Black advocate for Trump, especially during his first term, and remains loyal to him. He charged that Kirk wants to bring “white superiority attitudes” back to the Republican Party. Scott, of course, has long ignored or excused Trump’s attitude of “white superiority.”
Conservative media personality Armstrong Williams, who has kept a bit of distance from Trump, also criticized Kirk. He suggested he do more reading on US and Black history.
However, Black far-right condemnation was anything but universal. Chicago-based MAGA promoter Bishop Aubrey Shines and TPUSA Director of Black Outreach Pierre Wilson both went on Kirk’s podcast defending his attacks on King, insisting Kirk was not a racist, and adding their own venom to the mix. Wilson, for instance, stated, “Maybe just maybe he’s not the hero that everyone said he is.”
The Anti-King Trump
In Trump’s second term, propelled by his all-in, full-spectrum anti-DEI agenda, there’s no longer any need for his followers to pretend there’s anything about Martin Luther King Jr., however distorted, that needs to be praised. The president’s efforts to roll back the 20th century and overthrow everything King stood for have helped him forge allies with some of the most extreme elements in the nation. It’s always been the case for Trump that any positive mention of King was performative and meaningless. What matters now, however, are the actual policies and laws that Trump has promulgated, which are meant to wipe a King-like view of this country from the face of the Earth.
Although Trump was a teenager during King’s last years, there is no record of his participation in or concern for the civil rights and racial justice issues of that era. In fact, the only policy relationship to Blacks that he had then lay in the way he and his father violated the Fair Housing Act of 1968, which King had championed in his last days and which was passed by Congress and signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson on April 10, 1968, only six days after King was murdered.
In 1973, Donald Trump first broke into the news in New York and nationally when Trump properties in that city were sued by the Department of Justice for refusing to rent to African Americans. After a years-long court fight, a consent decree was signed in which Donald and his father, Fred Trump, admitted no guilt but were forced to change their rental practices. However, despite their denials, a later New York Times investigation “uncovered a long history of racial bias at his family’s properties, in New York and beyond.”
Donald Trump would, of course, love for the debate to shift to what the FBI—“the deep state”—did to King, and to see liberals and conservatives alike spin off on that tangent and forget about his Epstein troubles.
In our time, Trump’s attacks on civil rights and voting rights belie any rhetoric he may spew on King’s birthday or other occasions. In his first term, and with far less restraint the second time around, Trump has, in fact, sought to roll back decades of achievements in the areas of racial and social justice and democracy that King and so many others fought and died for. He’s taken a wrecking ball to institutions, programs, and policies throughout the federal government that were put in place to advance the full inclusion of people of color, women, the disabled, and the LGBTQ community. The attack on DEI is more broadly an effort to erase the hard-won gains that have evolved in the years from the passage of the post-Civil War 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal to President Johnson’s Great Society to the Black Lives Matter uprisings, while establishing an unchallengeable fascist state and authoritarian presidency.
The pushback against the expansion of rights from Ronald Reagan’s presidency to the Trumpian moment confronted laws that were passed, policies put in place, agencies that were established, and sometimes weak but stable democratic structures that limited the harm that could be done—until, that is, the Trump and MAGA movement. After only six months in office the second time around, driven by numerous unlawful decrees, nearly every department and agency in the federal government has eliminated its civil rights enforcement division. Discrimination cases involving people of color have been dismissed. Laws to fight bigotry continue to go unenforced. As Nikole Hannah Jones wrote in the New York Times, the administration is sending “a powerful message to American institutions that discrimination will not be punished.”
Donald Trump would, of course, love for the debate to shift to what the FBI—“the deep state”—did to King, and to see liberals and conservatives alike spin off on that tangent and forget about his Epstein troubles, his failing and flailing tariff war, and the growing unpopularity of his Big Ugly Budget and his recission proposal. A significant part of his base, which he consciously cultivated to a cult-like fidelity, is righteously angered and demanding answers. His deflections when caught in a lie or a scandal have long worked to move past the immediate crisis, but maybe, just maybe, not this time.
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