Rejecting Alternative Realities

A quick guide for surviving the White House’s torrent of lies, false reports and broadsides on our institutions

Image from collection of essays, Salvador Jiménez Murguía, Editor

The past week has seen a dizzying bombardment of fake reports, propaganda and even pressure upon institutions to revise our history.

In the past few days alone, Trump replaced the Bureau of Labor Statistics Commissioner with an unqualified Heritage Foundation hack. He brought in an “expert” to lie about household incomes. He falsely claimed crime is out of control in D.C. to justify federal commandeering of the city. And he demanded the Smithsonian review all its museum programs to ensure they align with his worldview.

It’s tempting to throw up our hands and surrender to this onslaught. But it’s far better, I advise, to understand the game and build some solid practices and defense against these attacks.

Today I’m going to walk through four of these. But first, let’s review the latest lies, propaganda and censorship.

A week of alternative realities

Who needs a jobs report?

Last week, the jobs numbers came in weaker than expected and included a big downward revision for the prior two months. This underscored what many have been saying all along: Tariffs are hurting the economy and reducing job growth.

Trump didn’t like that at all, so he did what any aspiring despot would by promptly firing the messenger.

In place of a respected civil servant with decades of experience, Trump nominated a right-wing ideologue by the name of E.J. Antoni. This person, just five years out of grad school, lacks any qualification for the job except the most important one for Trump, unabashed sycophancy.

On top of being a Project 2025 recruiter and author (Antoni filmed a video for the Heritage Foundation with the rather disturbing backdrop of a Nazi warship behind him), Antoni is a frequent commentator on Fox, which is enough for Trump to elevate him, just as he did with other unqualified nominees such as Pete Hegseth and Jeanine Pirro.

One of Antoni’s first statements was to suggest that we should simply do away with monthly job reports. Perhaps we’ll also stop seeing monthly inflation figures, too. After all, just as Trump tried with Covid numbers, if you stop surveying, the numbers don’t look so bad.

Look at this impossibly good chart!

Still smarting from the jobs numbers, Trump decided to bring in an economist to talk about some numbers that he finally liked. As the New York Times reported,

During an impromptu news conference, the president displayed charts from Stephen Moore, an economist at the conservative Heritage Foundation, that he said proved his economy was better than that of his predecessor, President Joseph R. Biden Jr.

“All new numbers,” Mr. Trump said, holding up a chart.

Right-wing media dutifully touted this incredible (but false) rise in household incomes since March.

So how did these numbers come about? Moore had been looking at census data figures and he assembled graphs that he believed Trump would be happy with. They were based on “unpublished data” from the Census, meaning they weren’t easily verifiable. But no matter!

“I showed him about five or six of these charts, and he was excited about the good news,” Moore said. “So he said let’s have an impromptu press conference.”

Rather than repeat the lies, I want to amplify a take-down of them.

We need the military to stop all the crime!

As I wrote about yesterday, crime in D.C. is at a 30-year low, and Trump himself had touted the low crime statistics as recently as May. But he seized upon an alleged carjacking incident involving a teenage boy and girl attacking a 19-year old former DOGE coder, known widely as “Big Balls,” to insist that crime is out of control in the nation’s capital, and therefore he as president needs to commandeer the Metropolitan Police Department for 30 days and order 800 National Guard troops deployed.

His cronies fell in line, with some even giving interviews that they are so scared that they don’t feel safe leaving the Capitol Building at night.

White conservatives have a long history of being afraid of anything dark, so this oddly tracks. But to claim that crime in D.C. is out of control is at odds with all of the data. It’s nothing more than a fabricated justification for cracking down, once more, on a city with a high minority population and a Black female mayor—just as Trump did with Los Angeles.

A top to bottom scrub of the museum of record

The Smithsonian has been a target of the White House lately. In recent days, the museum had, apparently at the urging of the White House, attempted to scrub Trump’s name from an exhibit about presidential impeachments, but the uproar caused it to back off of the plan and provide a lame excuse.

Now it finds itself under significant political pressure again. As Heather Cox Richardson reported in her Tuesday newsletter,

Today the administration advanced Project 2025’s determination to reshape American culture from a right-wing perspective when it sent a letter to Dr. Lonnie Bunch, the historian who serves as the secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, informing him they intend to review museum exhibitions, curatorial processes, planning, the use of collections, and artists grants in order to make sure they align “with the president’s directive to celebrate American exceptionalism, remove divisive or partisan narratives, and restore confidence in our shared cultural institutions.”

Per Anna Bower of Lawfare, the political commissar reviewing the Smithsonian is none other than a former criminal defense attorney for Trump who “didn’t like some of the museum’s exhibits when she visited after the inauguration” and apparently “convinced Trump to sign an executive order putting her in charge.” Joining her on the review will be Russell Vought, the OMB Director and a key author of Project 2025.

So yeah, not great.

Preparing mental defenses for a world of alternative realities

Trump’s lies are so legion, and his attacks upon our institutions and norms so widespread, that it’s easy to feel overwhelmed. The media, when it is doing its job, at best fact-checks the fake stories and reports. But missing from all of this is a solid way to bucket the lies and build resilience to them.

Today I want to talk about four strategies to diminish the effect of Trump’s manipulations and lies. These aren’t exhaustive, but they can be helpful to keep us all from being washed away in the flood.

First, recognize gaslighting. A steady stream of lies can make anyone begin to question reality. As an abusive bully, Trump gaslights instinctively as a way to dominate. He wants us all to feel like we’re the crazy ones, not him. A way to defeat this, quite simply, is to reassert the truth publicly.

For example, Trump regularly claims that Ukraine is responsible for the war. He has repeated that lie so many times that his followers have bought into it. The indisputable truth, which we all experienced in real time in February of 2022, is that Russia invaded Ukraine. We shouldn’t have to keep repeating this, but it is necessary in the face of Trump’s stream of lies, and it helps the people of Ukraine feel a little less crazy from hearing the upside down version all the time.

Second, understand his true targets. Punishing people who tell the truth doesn’t just impact those people negatively; it spreads a chill making others less willing to step forward. Trump knows that he only has to strike out against a handful of universities (or banks, law firms, media companies, you name it) and the ones he didn’t hit will think twice about crossing him.

At least that is Trump’s hope. This is why Prof. Timothy’s Snyder’s first rule for resisting fascism is to not capitulate in advance. It’s one thing to fold your hand if Trump actually targets you. Few can withstand the full force of the government. But it’s entirely another to give up without a fight. Within our communities, professional associations, schools and social networks, we need to be on the lookout for capitulation and to call it out.

Third, watch for “alternative facts.” Kellyanne Conway was roundly mocked during Trump’s first term for coining the term, but this is a real and dangerous threat today. Examples range from what we saw this week from Trump’s Heritage Foundation economist presenting bogus and improbable “household income” gains to RFK Jr.’s ideologically motivated quest to link vaccines to autism.

The first sign that alternative facts are coming is that they will get rid of official science or fact-based reporting, just as they have done with the BLS Commissioner and her findings. This opens the door to subjective reports that are more favorable to the Trump regime. When you see them purging scientists, data analysts and statisticians, understand that they are paving the way for alternative facts. We must identify these publicly and call for all to reject them.

Fourth, listen for dogwhistles. We have witnessed Trump’s nonstop attacks on academic and scientific institutions, DEI and any critiques of our history. Most understand that this is red meat for his MAGA base. But the reason these attacks are effective often goes unsaid.

Trump has riled up uneducated voters and pumped them full of grievances, identifying “elites,” “illegal immigrants” and “DEI” as the cause of their economic problems, rather than the corporations and uber wealthy who are robbing them blind and actively destroying their remaining social safety nets. He has even managed to convince some liberals that the reason universities must be punished is because they allowed antisemitism to spread unchecked.

The fact is, Trump doesn’t give a damn about antisemitism, or the plight of the working poor, or women athletes. He’s using these wedges to advance his own attacks upon the parts of civil society most likely to oppose him effectively.

Putting it together

If we don’t take Trump’s bait and allow truth to get lost in his noise, we can crawl out of the B.S. floodzone. Surviving and effectively resisting MAGA Trumpism requires disciplined thinking and clear-eyed assessment. And those things are admittedly hard to find and hold on to, especially when we’re all stumbling about in a chaotic political maelstrom.

It takes a bit of practice, but we really can get a handle on things because, at its most basic level, Trump is running the same damn playbook with the same tired tropes.

Once we understand that, we won’t feel as frustrated or immobilized by his myriad lies and ceaseless propaganda. In fact, we’ll start to see them for the flimsy material they are: He’s gaslighting us. He’s chilling speech. He’s spewing alternative facts. He’s dogwhistling to his base.

Once we learn to sort his lies into their respective slop buckets, they can’t muddy the waters as effectively and will have far less effect on our thinking.

And that will be a boon for our collective mental health.