To Live Inside a Lie

Firing the top labor statistics official for doing the normal monthly jobs report is only the latest attempt to force everyone else to abandon reality too

President Trump fired Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) Director Erika McEntarfer because the latest monthly jobs report looks bad and Trump wanted it to look good. He accused McEntarfer of “faked” numbers, but that’s almost certainly a lie. The president insists the economy is “booming,” the data says it isn’t, and he wants government officials to prioritize making him look good, reality be damned. That is the very essence of Trump’s political program.

It’s inherent in the slogan “Make America Great Again,” which calls for returning to a past that didn’t actually exist. They call poorer times more prosperous, and periods with higher violent crime rates safer. MAGA politicians, media, and influencers offer their followers the nostalgia-drenched lie that life was easy but now it’s hard, and whoever they already hate is to blame.

This has been going for almost a decade now, stacking lies upon lies, and there have been many opportunities to leave. Continuing to believe them is a choice. Living inside a lie is apparently what MAGA voters want.

The president’s latest lie, which only his supporters will buy, is that when BLS revised monthly job data down last year, the higher original numbers were fake to help Kamala Harris, but when BLS revised monthly job data down this year, the lower revised numbers are fake to hurt Trump. It’s absurd, and he offers no evidence, presumably because there isn’t any. A self-respecting Congress would impeach him for this country-damaging corruption, but thanks to obsequious Republican majorities, America doesn’t have one.

The “Job Numbers were RIGGED in order to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad,” announced the president of the United States, using that exact capitalization. How narcissistic must you be to think that everyone else—including the number-crunching nerds at BLS who’ve produced years of high quality, nonpartisan work—lives their lives focused on making you look good or bad? As if events are things others do to you personally, like in a one-player video game.

Yet millions of Americans find that behavior admirable, and think it’s a good quality in a leader. Some are swimming in propaganda and genuinely believe what MAGA media tells them, but are nevertheless choosing to reject anything showing otherwise. Millions more willfully ignore the lying, or choose to tolerate it, because they want other things Trump offers. But whatever their reasons, they’re choosing fiction over reality, collectively pretending anything good was the president’s doing, including things that didn’t actually happen, while anything bad is someone victimizing him (or didn’t happen).

It amounts to opposing truth as a value, rejecting true-or-false as something that matters. And they not only choose to live inside a lie, they try to push it on everyone else.

Lies All the Way Down

This is considered impolite to point out in many mainstream venues, but to be a Republican in good standing today, you have to believe, or at least go along with, an insane amount of lies. I don’t mean things that are open to argument, such as “what’s the ideal tax rate?” or “is wokeness stifling free speech?,” but measured facts, such as “do Black airline pilots have worse crash records than White pilots?” (no) or “who pays U.S. tariffs on foreign goods?” (American business and consumers).

There are tons of lies demonizing groups of people MAGA hates, like heavily overstating violent crime by illegal immigrants and in big cities, or various lies about trans people. There are running lies that require regular revisions to maintain, such as how a slowing economy is in excellent shape, or other countries are making concessions they’re not actually making. There are silly lies to perpetuate MAGA’s cultural fictions, such as denouncing a pro-immigrant, pro-diversity portrayal of Superman as a woke revision. And there are absurd, North Korea-style lies casting the old, overweight president as a physical specimen, and a premier expert on things he clearly knows little about.

Plus a bunch of lies I didn’t mention. The list is so long, they do it so often, recounting it all would make readers’ eyes glaze over. People who value truth find it tedious to debunk the same things over and over. That’s one reason this mass lying works.

Right-wing information spaces treat the lies as established fact, similar to how Star Wars and Marvel fans talk about canon. Republicans in Congress have to go along with Trump’s latest lies when asked, but some try to avoid that by lying that they didn’t see what he said. But whatever they believe in their hearts, a large majority of Republicans push, cover up, or defend his most consequential lies, such as those relating to his 2020-21 coup attempt.

The overall effect is greater than the sum of its parts, not just believing (or going along with) specific lies, but adopting a post-truth worldview.

In 2025 America’s Trump-centered, internet-boosted phantasmagoria, everything is possible and nothing is true. Driving this distorted information environment are the White House communications team, Fox News and other regime-friendly media, and a vibrant online ecosystem of YouTubers, podcasters, X, and more. On top of that, post-truth values have gained influence in mainstream media, seen in interventions from Trump-donating owners at Washington Post and the LA Times, censorship under government pressure at CBS, and distortions in pursuit of forced balance at outlets such as the New York Times.

Everyone lies, yes, and everyone in national politics has, at some point, said something that is less than fully true. But that doesn’t mean they all lie as often, as blatantly, or as egregiously, about things big and small. The cynical claim that all politicians lie to similar degrees is yet another lie, and though perhaps unintentional, just helps the biggest liars.

Institutionalized Lying

Trump firing the BLS Director institutionalizes the effort to live inside a lie. It’s one of the most egregious examples, but hardly the first.

Under this president, the Department of Health and Human Services has been reoriented around lying about vaccines and pushing homeopathic remedies that don’t work, such as using cod liver oil and vitamin A to prevent measles. HHS Secretary Robert Kennedy Jr. lied that measles patients who took the vitamin experienced an “almost miraculous and instantaneous recovery,” and some parents who followed his advice gave their children liver damage.

The Department of Justice has been reoriented from an evidence-based law enforcement organization to a lie-based personalist one. Attorney General Pam Bondi lies that Donald Trump is an innocent victim of lawbreaking he clearly did, and lies to accuse his political opponents of crimes they didn’t do. She lied that the DOJ would release files from its investigation of convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein when saying that she would perpetuated lies about Democrats, then lied that she was revealing new information but showed publicly known things, then when leaks revealed that Trump’s name appears multiple times, lied that there was nothing of note in the files so DOJ won’t release them.

In the Bondi DOJ, federal prosecutors’ job is lying. When one admitted in court to an “absence of evidence” justifying the administration deporting Maryland legal resident Kilmar Abrego Garcia, Bondi placed the attorney and his supervisor on leave. Ordered to drop a strong corruption case against New York City Mayor Eric Adams because Adams said he’d help federal immigration enforcement—which sure looks like a quid pro quo—ten prosecutors refused to sign their name to a lying document and resigned. Eventually Bondi found one who’d do it.

As Hannah Arendt explained, this process degrades institutions by getting officials to lie or replacing them with someone who will. And the less competent replacements are more reliably loyal, since they owe their prestigious position to serving a corrupt president’s personal interests, not to talent or public service.

There’s more of this now, but it’s always been core to the MAGA political project. Trump started insisting everyone live inside a lie as soon as he first took office in 2017, absurdly overstating how many people attended his inauguration, and demanding officials push the lie even as aerial photos showed otherwise. This continued through large-scale lies, like how Russia’s well-documented 2016 anti-American intelligence operation is a “hoax,” and smaller-scale lies, like when he altered a hurricane map with a sharpie so the picture matched his lies about where it would hit. In his first term, Trump removed Inspectors General from multiple federal agencies because they were telling the truth, reporting lawbreaking to Congress as per their job.

Trump’s second term is doing that institutional lying on a larger scale. Along with reorienting DOJ, HHS, and other federal departments around lies, the administration is at war with science, universities, media, and courts — any public or private institution that can credibly say “that’s not true.”

But ordering the Environmental Protection Agency to lie that climate change does not endanger human health, and to stop treating greenhouse gas emissions as air pollution, won’t stop bigger wildfires and floods. Getting the leaders of the U.S. intelligence community to publicly lie that a few U.S. bombs totally destroyed Iran’s nuclear program won’t prevent Iran from enriching more uranium, and if anything, gives the Iranian program cover. On international trade, lying that vague statements are amazing deals won’t make goods and services flow.

“Reality,” wrote Philip K. Dick, “is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.”

Corrupting government employment data won’t get any unemployed person a job or make any stagnant company grow. It just hinders economists’ ability to understand what’s happening, and makes the United States a less reliable place to do business, undermining investors’ and policymakers’ ability to make informed decisions.

That won’t crash the economy on its own, but it’s yet another degradation making things worse. A credible reputation for factual data, once thrown away, is hard to get back. But nothing is more important to the president and his supporters than living inside a lie, and trying to force everyone else to as well.