August 13, 2025 11:26 AM UTC

Everything is Awesome (Or It's Fake)

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• by: Colorado Pols

UPDATE: Here’s the latest example of the “post truth” bubble Republicans are living in today:

This simply isn’t true, folks. It has never been true, and in all probability never will be.

But Republicans say catch them if you can.

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One of the more pernicious effects of the rise of Donald Trump and the MAGA movement — impacts that will, sadly, probably long outlive the Big Orange Guy — is the persistent assault on truth. If facts don’t back up Republican claims, then they are labeled as “fake.” If there is no data to support a particular initiative, then Trump and his allies just invent new “data.”

In its “Reliable Sources” newsletter, CNN looks at the concerning increase in the Trump administration’s efforts to re-write reality for the “Make America Gullible Again” movement:

Deny the data. Disrupt the data collectors. And demand a different result.

That is what we’re seeing now from some federal officials. It’s a common theme in several of this week’s biggest stories, and it has big implications for news coverage.

“Crime stats in big blue cities are fake,” President Trump’s deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller said yesterday on X, clearly reacting to the news media’s fact-checking of Trump’s extreme exaggerations about crime in DC. “The real rates of crime, chaos & dysfunction are orders of magnitude higher,” Miller insisted.

“Coupled with the attack” on the Bureau of Labor Statistics, CNN senior political analyst Ron Brownstein said, “this is rapidly advancing deeper into the territory of insisting that all data that doesn’t conform to Trump preferences is inherently invalid and that only the leader can tell you the truth.” Brownstein called it “a hallmark of authoritarians” throughout history. [Pols emphasis]

Don’t like the new job numbers? Fire the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics and appoint a replacement who doesn’t understand how the data works anyway.

Can’t rely on crime statistics to back up your narrative? Make up your own narrative (nevermind that you’re contradicting yourself).

Journalism professor Jay Rosen calls this strategy an attempt to “Nullify the Real”:

President Trump’s rhetoric about “fake news” keeps expanding to new categories. In the past month, he has assailed “fake intelligence agents,” dismissed “fake polls,” claimed “the Russia thing was fake,” and declared that “the Democrats are fake.”

The effect is to sow doubt about anything and everything. As veteran journalism professor Jay Rosen said in a Q&A with Mark Jacob earlier this week, “with this doubt comes friction, controversy, commotion, emotion, backlash, accusation, disgust, momentum. And with the energy released by these reactions you can power your political movement.”

Rosen asserted that Trump has trained the MAGA movement to “reject reality on a sweeping scale, and discredit the whole idea that we can know what’s happening in our world.” The idea, he suggested, is to “nullify the real.” [Pols emphasis]

This effort to “Nullify the Real” has trickled down to other Republicans, including Colorado Rep. Gabe Evans (R-Ft. Lupton). In recent months, Evans has claimed:

♦ That data from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) is biased and inaccurate (because it showed that Trump’s “big beautiful bullshit budget bill” would cause millions to lose health coverage through Medicaid and would increase the national deficit by trillions of dollars);

♦ That Medicaid should be celebrated and nobody should pay attention to the massive cuts he voted to approve;

♦ That the Weld County Food Bank actually wants to see massive cuts to the federal food assistance program (SNAP);

♦ That “100%” of deportations and detentions are justified and targeting criminals (despite reams of data proving that Evans’s “gangsters not grandmas” narrative is complete fiction);

♦ That the Trump administration is responsible for falling homicide rates in Colorado, even though the data he cites is from 2024.

Evans even continues to spout lies about his own origin story…despite the fact that journalists have revealed that his tale about how his Mexican immigrant grandfather earned U.S. citizenship is utter nonsense.

There’s really no point in trying to meet with Evans about a particular issue, because he’ll just dismiss any contradictory information provided as “fake news.” You can’t try to inform someone who has already decided on his own “truth.”

When truth and facts no longer matter, discussion is pointless. There’s only one option left: Vote for somebody else.