They lie about the numbers. All of them.
Like autocratic regimes before them, the Trump administration has taken to fudging the numbers on everything. Even casualties.
It’s a truism of history that fascists make the truth difficult or even impossible to count. This one is no different, but it’s doing it faster than America was ready for.
My favorite film is called The Lives of Others. It’s an Oscar-winning story about a playwright in East Germany in the 1980s who decides to fight back against the cruelty of the regime. He’s being surveilled by the Stasi, the secret police, so his weapon is an anonymous essay he writes to describe to the world what life’s like on the other side of the wall. (I get that, for me, this film is a bit on the nose.)
The playwright manages to get the bombshell essay smuggled out to a West German magazine, which publishes it and reveals something the East German government had buried for years: its own citizens were killing themselves at one of the highest rates in the world. The suicide numbers were off the charts. Rather than try to fix the problem, the state’s statistics office stopped publishing suicide numbers in 1977. The regime simply made that inconvenient number disappear.
Most every authoritarian project in history has taken control of the “measurable” reality en route to taking control of its people. The Soviet Union, for instance, manufactured grain harvest numbers to hide the famine it was causing. And Stalin’s regime literally redrew census results because, after purges and starvation, the real population count would’ve been an admission it was slaughtering its own population. Numbers aren’t supposed to lie, so in a sense, they make the very best lies for a dictator.
Trump understood this instinctively, on day one. Literally day one. You remember. The first official act of his first term was to have his first press secretary stand at a podium and declare his inauguration crowd “the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period,” a claim so easily disprovable that photos of a half-empty National Mall were already circulating while he said it! When my fellow Trump appointee Kellyanne Conway was asked to defend the lie, she didn’t even bother pretending it was true. She called it “alternative facts.” That phrase has been like a mission statement of both Trump administrations ever since.
Almost ten years later, what should’ve been an embarrassing historical footnote was instead a clear warning sign. The Trump administration would try to take us all down the dark and winding path cut by autocracies, luring Americans deeper into a forest of lies while the truth is left behind, beaten and bloodied in a ditch. That sound dramatic to you? Well, it has been dramatic.
Nowhere has this been clearer than when it comes to human lives. We were reminded just days ago.
As the Iran war ground deeper into a stalemate, the Pentagon dropped the official death toll from 18 to 14. No, four soldiers didn’t magically come back to life; the department simply invented a new bureaucratic category to reclassify them the very same weekend the president took to social media to debate casualty figures. His lieutenants also re-labeled soldiers with severe brain injuries as suffering only “minor” wounds. Earlier, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had dismissed a strike that killed six Americans as “a squirter,” and complained that coverage of dead troops was only intended to “make the president look bad.”
The depravity of these lies about war dead was presaged by the administration’s pervasive lying on immigration. Amidst a deportation crackdown that has seen livestreams of people killed in cold blood, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has been telling the country not to worry. It’s focused on deporting the worst of the worst to keep us safe, insisting that DHS is merely fulfilling Trump’s promise to get rid of rapists and murderers and drug dealers. If that was the case, why did the administration fight so hard against releasing the numbers about who it was rounding up? I’ll tell you. Because once we got a hold of those figures, we discovered that my former department was illegally arresting innocent people en masse (literally thousands and thousands, according to shocked federal judges), detaining American citizens, and locking up exactly the types of people they said they were not going to round up. Leaked ICE data has shown that nearly three in four people booked into immigration custody have no criminal conviction, and at some point, it’s been up to ninety percent. How’s that for a big lie?
(Meanwhile, DHS brags to the MAGA base about deporting 622,000 people even though its own internal data said the number was closer to half that, and it claims 1.9 million more “self-deported”, a figure conveniently impossible to check.)
As for the deaths, DHS recently decided to stop tracking whether people in their custody have died, as long as those deaths happen off premises. It would be like a hospital discharging its sickest patients to the parking lot so their eventual corpses don’t count against its statistics. This is ghastly. And there’s no other purpose for it than to evade accountability and prevent more future investigations into the Department’s breathtaking and systemic misconduct.
It’s not just lives. The Trump regime is faking the numbers about our livelihoods.
When the July 2025 jobs report showed the weakest hiring in years, Trump fired the messenger, ousting the Senate-confirmed, career nonpartisan head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics and accusing her (with zero evidence) of rigging data to hurt him. His handpicked replacement was a Heritage Foundation pundit with no statistical background who had to be withdrawn after reporters found a deleted account of his full of degrading attacks on his political enemies. A year later, the agency still doesn’t have a Senate-confirmed commissioner, and the once-trusted data coming out of the government is now suspect.
Meanwhile, Trump has told the country repeatedly and with total confidence that tariffs have brought in $18 trillion, and it’s making us richer. That’s more than double the entire federal budget. (He’s learned that no one around him will challenge his absurd exaggerations, so he says the biggest number he can think of.) But the real number, according to his own Treasury Department, is around $236 billion. That’s bad enough—and thank goodness it’s not in the trillions. An American who thinks about it for more than a moment realizes that all that “revenue” isn’t really a windfall for America, it’s a tax… on them… making their products more expensive and giving Trump the decision about how to spend our hard-earned money instead of us.
The examples could keep me here all week: the hurricane forecast he redrew with a Sharpie rather than admit a mistake… or the bogus crime statistics his administration massaged to justify federal takeovers of American cities… or the prices he insists are falling while every grocery visit I’ve done for my family says otherwise… or the vaccine data twisted to fit a conspiracy theory… or, best of all, the election he still claims he won in a landslide.
My point is that these aren’t separate stories about misguided U.S. officials who need to brush up on math. Our government in 18 short months has made it national policy to lie to the people and to fake the figures as a literal means of manipulating public opinion and to build up the leader’s ego, even if it’s atop the bodies of dead troops or dead protesters or dead immigrants. The government’s numbers only get revised for one purpose. Bigger when Trump needs a win, smaller when Trump needs to minimize embarrassment.
History has been waving its arms, begging for us to notice this. The brutal despotisms of the past began their repression by insisting numbers were unknowable or unnecessary or “woke.” Before long, they made the mere act of asking for the data itself a crime. If you think we haven’t entered that second phase, look at the case of Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson, whose home was raided and devices seized this year because she was working directly with federal employees to circumvent the Trump administration’s censorship. To tell the truth about what was happening from the front lines of the federal workforce. So they went after her… and are hunting her sources.
The East German government thought it had solved the suicide problem by making the statistic disappear. Of course, it hadn’t solved anything. It had just made sure nobody could prove how bad life really was. If we take the lesson, we can see that our mission is something simpler and less dramatic than what people think of when it comes to “resistance.” We must keep counting, we must continue cataloguing the corruption, and we must never stop smuggling out the raw data so that America doesn’t slide into despotism the way the regime hopes we will—lost in the numbers.
Your friend, in defiance,
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