Analysis: Information is power, and Trump wants more control over it

CNN

2 days ago

Climate change reports, deleted. DEI initiatives, banned. Local TV and radio stations, defunded.
Books, removed from military academies. Names of civil rights leaders, erased from ships. History lessons, purged from museums.
The list goes on and on. President Trump and his government appointees keep asserting more control over ideas and information — which has the effect of taking power away from independent researchers, historians, and the real news outlets that he frequently calls 'fake.'
Friday's abrupt firing of the labor statistics chief is one of the most dramatic examples yet.
But this push for control has been evident all throughout his second term — and the individual headlines should be analyzed as part of a pattern, lest the memories start to fade.
Remember the headlines about vaccine data being deleted from government websites last winter? Or the bogus math on DOGE's 'receipts' page? How about the 'Friday night purge' of impartial watchdogs investigating abuse within the government?
'Trump increasingly is playing the role of information gatekeeper,' Clay Calvert of the American Enterprise Institute wrote a prophetic blog post back in February.
Calvert said Trump was 'dictating access on his terms' – promoting MAGA media outlets while punishing The Associated Press for not adopting Trump's 'Gulf of America' name.
That AP dispute was about control over information. So, too, was the Trump White House's decision to purge a database of transcripts documenting his announcements and public appearances.
The president has also objected to unflattering stories by lodging legal threats against news outlets. In one recent case, he followed through with a defamation lawsuit against the Wall Street Journal, which analysts said could have a chilling effect on reporting writ large.
The White House has framed some of its most aggressive rewrites and removals as common-sense corrections. 'Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History' was the title of one such executive order in March.
Another move to shut down a reliable source of information, the US-funded international broadcaster known as Voice of America, was framed by the administration as a way to curtail 'radical propaganda.' One of the alleged examples was a six-year-old news report 'about transgender migrants seeking asylum in the United States.'
Every administration tries to shape reality to some degree. But 'Trump's statistical purges have been faster and more sweeping — picking off not just select factoids but entire troves of public information,' the Washington Post asserted in March.
One glaring example involves the National Climate Assessment, a congressionally mandated report on climate change. The authors of the assessment were fired and previous versions 'have been hidden from view on government websites,' as CNN's Zachary B. Wolf wrote last week.
Trump's dispute with the Bureau of Labor Statistics further raises the stakes — and the alarms about creeping authoritarianism.
'Suppressing statisticians is a time-honored tool for leaders trying to solidify their power and stifle dissent,' George Stephanopoulos said on ABC's 'This Week' on Sunday. 'It's happened throughout history, most recently in Venezuela and Turkey.'
His guest, Lawrence Summers, the former treasury secretary, said that 'firing statisticians goes with threatening the heads of newspapers. It goes with launching assaults on universities. It goes with launching assaults on law firms.'
'This is really scary stuff,' Summers added.
Yet some Trump aides and allies are publicly defending the firing. National Economic Council director Kevin Hassett said Monday morning on CNBC that the jobs data 'could be politically manipulated.'
This battle for control isn't happening in a vacuum. There is evidence that media scrutiny and public pressure do make a difference.
Back in March, the Associated Press revealed that an anti-DEI crusade at the Pentagon led to images of war heroes, women, minorities and even the famed Enola Gay warplane being flagged for removal. The embarrassing episode forced Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's aides into a defensive crouch.
Similarly, just last week, the Washington Post reported on the Smithsonian removing Trump's name from an impeachment exhibit at the National Museum of American History.
The whiff of scandal was so overwhelming that the museum issued a statement on Saturday denying any White House pressure and pledging to update the exhibit in the coming weeks.