Washington • It’s not enough that President Trump and his advisers have been arguing for years that official government data is bad, untrustworthy, phony, manipulated for political gain. Now they are working to lend credence to these smears and conspiracy theories — by making them true.
During the Obama administration, Trump repeatedly claimed that official numbers released by our independent federal statistical agencies — such as the unemployment rate — were fake. Legions of career civil servants were all cooking the books to make Democrats look better, he claimed. Trump’s economic advisers and boosters (including Stephen Moore and Herman Cain, whom Trump now plans to nominate for the Federal Reserve Board) joined in the baseless conspiracy theorizing.