LEILA FADEL, HOST:
What happens when the president says U.S. government data can't be trusted? President Trump fired the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics in response to a jobs report he didn't like. And yesterday, he insisted the real numbers were actually good.
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PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: We had no confidence. I mean, the numbers were ridiculous, what she announced. But that was just one negative number. All the numbers seem to be great.
MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
The news echoed a moment from his first term when, at a 2017 news conference, then-White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer was asked why the president touted a positive jobs report after disparaging negative ones.
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SEAN SPICER: I talked to the president prior to this. And he said, to quote him very clearly, they may have been phony in the past, but it's very real now.
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MARTIN: This year, when Republicans were debating a massive tax and spending bill, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said it would add trillions to the deficit. Trump accused the CBO of playing politics.
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TRUMP: CBO, who never gives good - basically, it's a Democrat group. And we're getting tremendous reviews on the bill.
FADEL: Since Trump took office again, we've reported on data scrubbed from websites for the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention. CDC webpages that track the health of LGBTQ young people disappeared entirely. And elsewhere in today's program, we'll hear about the administration's plans to kill NASA satellites that measure greenhouse gases.
Peter Baker has been following all this, too. He's the chief White House correspondent for The New York Times, and he joins me now. Good morning.
PETER BAKER: Hey. Good morning. How are you?
FADEL: I'm doing well. Peter, every administration - right? - tries to control narratives, spin facts. What is different about what this president and this administration are doing?
BAKER: Yeah. What's different here is that we have a president who's actually trying to enforce his version of reality on government agencies that are traditionally assigned to provide neutral, nonpartisan, basic facts that both parties can use to debate policies. You know, the president - look, this is a president who has always been untethered, let's say, from the truth at times. He came to office by saying that Barack Obama wasn't born in this country.
FADEL: Right.
BAKER: Not true. He explained away his 2020 loss by saying there was massive fraud, which wasn't true. Now he's trying to say to agencies of the government in this second term that if they don't toe the line, they're in effect risking their job. We've seen that with intelligence analysis. He didn't like that, and his people went after the analysts and tried to pressure them into changing their assessment. And we've seen that, as you say, with scrubbing of government websites. We even saw that at the Smithsonian last week, where it turned out they had a exhibit on impeachment. They took Donald Trump's name out of the exhibit on impeachment, though, even though, of course, he was impeached twice. So he's trying to force his version of reality on government agencies that aren't supposed to be partisan.
FADEL: Now, you just listed this laundry list of data that's either being questioned or removed entirely. And you recently wrote that these tactics are right out of an authoritarian playbook. Why do you say that? And what do scholars you spoke to say or compare the president's efforts to?
BAKER: Well, they do. And I - look, I reported for four years from Moscow when Vladimir Putin came to power. And there's a long history of this in places like Russia or China, other places where they use data to make arguments that nobody can trust - that because they are perceived to be data that's just simply falsified or massaged or whatever, data that can't be trusted. We get this all the time now when China says what its economic growth is. Nobody really completely knows whether they can trust that or not because it's a government that is willing, we have seen, to play fast and loose with numbers.
And that worry you hear in Washington today is that the United States might be heading down the same track. Authoritarian governments like to control information so they can tell their people or tell themselves that things are better than they really are. But that doesn't mean they actually - they are better. And in fact, you can't convince somebody who's lost a job or who may be paying more at the grocery store that they're not simply because statistics are said to be different. And I think that that's something that we haven't seen in this country in a while.
FADEL: Now, the White House has told us and others that the firing was because this person was totally incompetent, something that no evidence was presented for. But the move, this recent move and the other things you described - has this created a chilling effect on the people who gather and analyze data for the government?
BAKER: Oh, it absolutely has. People understand the message here. They don't even need the White House to tell them at this point that - to do this or that with websites or with the information they have, because they know the consequences there. They've seen what's happened to the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and they recognize that they themselves are at risk if they offend the White House.
FADEL: Peter Baker is chief White House correspondent for The New York Times. Thank you for your time and your insights.
BAKER: Thank you. It's good talking to you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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