August 04, 2025 01:07 PM UTC

Shooting The Messenger With Cory Gardner, Gabe Evans, And Donald Trump

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• by: Colorado Pols

Republicans in Washington have had what can best be described as a fraught relationship with nonpartisan bean-counting authorities like the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) going back many years. Back in 2017, when the then-GOP majority during President Donald Trump’s first term was trying and failing to repeal the Affordable Care Act, then-Sen. Cory Gardner asked for “analysis outside of CBO” after the office estimated that repealing the ACA would take away health coverage from 22 million people.

Fortunately, in 2017 the worst did not come to pass. Republicans blinked in part due to the CBO’s estimates, and the ACA survived.

This year, when confronted by numbers from the same CBO projecting millions of Americans losing their health coverage following the passage of the “We’re All Going To Die Act” Republican budget bill, Colorado’s latter-day Cory Gardner Rep. Gabe Evans claimed without evidence that the CBO was “staffed significantly by either known registered Democrats or Democrat donors,” separately asserting that their estimates amounted to “fear mongering for political purposes.”

Then on Friday, as CNBC reports, Trump took the messenger-blasting to an ominous new level with the firing of the commissioner of the Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics after the publication of both new and revised jobs numbers incompatible with Trump’s delusions of the greatest policies ever and the greatest budget bill ever leading to the greatest economy ever:

President Donald Trump and one of his top economic advisors on Monday stoked baseless conspiracies about federal jobs data, suggesting without evidence that Friday’s weaker-than-expected employment report had been “rigged” by federal workers bent on sabotaging the president.

“All over the U.S. government, there have been people who have been resisting Trump everywhere they can,” National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett said Monday on CNBC.

Trump, meanwhile, claimed on social media that the report, which painted a dour picture of the economy, was “RIGGED” and the previous months’ revisions had been “CONCOCTED in order to make a great Republican Success look less stellar!!!”

In the short run, it’s entirely possible that this kind of heavy-handed intimidation of anyone who dares to report news that Cory Gardner, Gabe Evans, and Donald Trump don’t like will result in a reduction, or at least an altered spin, on negative reports from nonpartisan sources about the Republican agenda. In the long run, especially as the outcomes inevitably track the expectations of the experts and not the political whims of a President determined to manufacture his own reality, the result is a loss in confidence in institutions once counted upon to deliver the facts without fear or favoritism.

And then, perhaps beyond our 78-year-old President’s horizon but not that of 39-year-old Gabe Evans, it ends in a disaster that future generations read about in history books.

It all begins with the first urgent need to do away with an inconvenient truth.