Donald Trump's deliberate corruption of reality-based governing (Greg Sargent, WaPo)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2017/03/13/donald-trumps-deliberate-corruption-of-reality-based-governing/
The White House and Republicans are bracing for bad news in the Congressional Budget Office score of the new GOP health plan, which could come as early as Monday. It is expected to find that the GOP effort which President Trump has endorsed could leave many millions without coverage, and on the Sunday shows, top Trump advisers sought to discredit the CBOs finding in advance.
But all of this should be seen in a much larger context. Were seeing a broad White House effort to corrode the very ideal of reality-based governing, something that includes not just a discrediting of institutions such as the CBO but also the weakening of the influence of science and data over agency decision-making and the deliberate misuse of our democracys institutional processes to prop up Trumps lies about his popular support and political opponents.
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By itself, this might not be all that outlandish there is a long history of such stuff but it needs to be placed in the larger context. There is Conways off-the-wall depiction above of the purpose of congressional investigations. Meanwhile, when Trump got called out for the lie that he won the popular vote but for millions who voted illegally, the White House threatened an investigation to prove it true, using the vow of probes as a tool to obfuscate efforts to hold him accountable. On Friday, Sean Spicer greeted the good February jobs report by claiming that the numbers may have been phony in the past when they reflected job growth during the Obama presidency that Trump derided as fictional but now theyre very real. Government data is real only when Trump says it is. Everyone had a good laugh over this, but at the risk of being very earnest, government data is supposed to inform policymaking.
Scott Pruitt, the new head of the Environmental Protection Agency, has now clarified that he does not accept the scientific consensus that human activity is the primary cause of global warming, which could put the agencys agenda directly at odds with the laws and regulations its supposed to enforce. The White House has explicitly said the new version of Trumps travel ban is designed in part to demonstrate that his national security power will not be questioned, and when a leaked Department of Homeland Security assessment undercut the substantive case for the ban, a senior administration official said: This is not the intelligence assessment the president asked for. We have not seen the one that he has asked for, however.
We need a new vocabulary to describe what were seeing here.
Paul Krugman made similar points about keeping this attack on the CBO in context in his column today:
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/13/opinion/facts-are-enemies-of-the-people.html?smid=tw-share
And when I checked his Twitter feed to get that link, I saw he'd tweeted seconds earlier to say that he and Greg Sargent are on the same page: