Trump’s War on Transparency

Since January 2025, Donald Trump has launched a furious assault on America’s democratic information. He has tried to undermine decades of government openness, with a toxic combination of censorship, dismantling and a slew of misinformation and lying. 

But what exactly is the Trump administration doing? And, even more importantly, why? In a world awash with data, does the Trump White House really believe it can black out the web, and avoid transparency? And if not, why are they even trying?

So far, the Trump administration, in its usual chaotic way, is fighting a censorship war on numerous fronts.  

Blacked-out government

The first part of the attack involves deleting and removing government webpages. Exactly how many are gone is unclear, but the New York Times calculated that in the first month of Trump’s administration around 8,000 US government webpages had been removed. 

The blackout has focused on particular areas, such as climate change and equality. Pages relating to diversity, what it terms “gender ideology” as well as ‘vaccines, veterans’ care, hate crimes and scientific research’ have been removed, some temporarily and some permanently. One deeply worrying deletion pattern concerns mentions of LGBT+ and trans issues and policies, where pages have been changed or removed across many departments, from education to healthcare. Analysis of the CDC blackout in February found that ‘among the many pages that remain down are Health Disparities Among LQBTQ Youth, Interim Clinical Considerations for Use of Vaccine for Mpox Prevention, and Fast Facts: HIV and Transgender People’. 

To give a sense, this study found that ‘between January 21 and February 11, 2025, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) removed 203 datasets (13% of its online datasets, a reduction from 1519 to 1316)’. The situation is, as the study puts it, ‘dynamic’ as ‘various datasets have been removed, restored, manipulated, or not posted as planned’. What this means is that ‘Public health experts will have more trouble identifying trends in disease outbreaks or overdose deaths and assessing or advocating for various interventions’. One senior official resigned over the censorship in April arguing that "unfortunately, recent events have made me question whether NIH continues to be a place where I can freely conduct unbiased science." 

Even more worrying, outside of government, there is a cascade of self-censorship. Differing groups are ‘obeying in advance’ and deleting without even being asked. Business are rolling back or rebranding their own equality initiatives, as are universities. The US military is deleting photos and records relating to diversity including it seems, rather over-zealously, any reference to the Enola Gay. Trump’s Executive Order on ‘Restoring truth and sanity to America History’ led to an ‘internal review’ on an exhibition on Benjamin Franklin’s links to slavery and a film about George Floyd.  Experts argued that this would have a ‘chilling effect’ across museums. 

The echoes can be felt all the way down to schools and public libraries. Books have been banned on military bases including To Kill a Mockingbird and The Handmaid’s Tale. This builds on deeply worrying trends, with ‘10,046 instances of individual books banned, affecting 4,231 unique titles’ across US schools between 2023 and 2024.

Dismantling the Right to Know

A second prong of the attack involves weakening and dismantling the formal mechanisms that keep government open. The US has one of the world’s oldest Freedom of Information Acts (FOIA), and Presidents have swung between rather tepid enthusiasm and intense dislike of the FOIA. But trying to get rid, outright, of such a law is tricky, and likely to provoke a backlash. 

A better way is to quietly starve those who carry out the law of resources and personnel. This was done in Trump’s first term, when this analysis found that ‘FOIA rejections and redactions increased under Trump, while delays grew at most federal agencies and the number of FOIA lawsuits skyrocketed’. 

The US FOIA was already slow and creaking, and Trump’s second administration has been marked by ‘obstruction, secrecy, and lawlessness’. As well as document shredding and avoiding FOIA, it appears that some officials who deal with requests, and even entire teams, are being removed. RFK, who promised ‘radical transparency’ has ‘gutted’ FOIA teams across the ‘Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Food and Drug Administration, the National Institutes of Health’, as has the Office of Personnel Management. This has meant that, in various parts of the US government,  ‘operations to release public records requests largely ground to a halt’. 

There has been a series of victories and defeats for FOIA. Following RFK’s sackings, some, but not all, Health FOIA officials were reappointed. The Supreme Court then temporarily upheld the policy that DOGE was not FOIA-able while the operations of ICE and the growing network of camps remains shrouded in secrecy. In August the new plans by the Department of Energy to ‘cull’ its FOIA backlog were seen as a test of a new way to dismantle and weaken FOIA.

And it isn’t just the present being dismantled. It’s the past. In a distinctly Orwellian manoeuvre, probably motivated by his own problems with document storage, Trump embarked on what one headline described as a ‘Hostile Takeover of the National Archives — and Our Nation’s History’, when he sacked 27 staff including the head. Marco Rubio, who was caught up in signal gate, is now acting head,  but don’t worry, he is supported by a former head of the Richard Nixon Foundation. 

At the same time, Trump has been transparent about very particular things. In January 2025 he ordered the declassification of documents about JFK, Robert F Kennedy and Martin Luther King, claiming ‘it is in the national interest to finally release all records related to these assassinations without delay’. Tulsi Gabbard claimed that "President Trump is ushering in a new era of maximum transparency."

Avoidance 

A third prong is about hiding. As well as not letting people get to the records, another tactic is to not create them in the first place. Emails, WhatsApp and signal offer quick and easy way to communicate which, as a side benefit, can easily escape official record keeping. It was just such avoidance that was weaponised against Hilary Clinton in 2016. Her emails, as it were. 

Avoidance now looks like a systematic policy across Trump’s administration. Trump appointees have repeatedly been engaging in what the BBC referred to as ‘questionable email practices’ , while one group of officials were busily taping back Trumps’ shredded records. 

The concrete proof of this was seen in the ‘signal’ leak in March 2025, when an Atlantic journalist was accidentally made part of a group chat around military action in Yemen. The Trump government reacted in time honoured fashion claiming the incident was a hoax and fake news, before arguing that the information was not classified and contained nothing of note-until the Atlantic eventually published a transcript to prove it was. Significantly, all the messages were set to be deleted after four weeks (against record laws, which mandate a two year retention). 

This is not, it now appears, an isolated case. It is now ‘routine…to discuss sensitive national security issues on the encrypted messaging app Signal’ and that it was ‘widely used….and even came preinstalled on their government devices’.

What the leak proves, in effect, is that the most sensitive government business is done outside of the official recording system. Life and death decisions are being deleted and erased, so that no trace exists for later questions or scrutiny.  Neither Congress, journalists or posterity can know what happened or why. Remember Nixon wasn’t caught out by his deeds, but by the fact they were recorded.

Misinformation and lies 

The final part of Trump’s assault needs little introduction. To put some numbers on his lying, Trump  ‘made 30,573 false or misleading claims in his four years as president, increasing year-on-year from six per day in his first year to 39 per day in his fourth’. Perhaps the starkest illustration of the scale is that during Covid, Donald Trump was ‘likely the largest driver of the COVID-19 misinformation “infodemic”’. The single largest spreader of misinformation was not Russian bots on Facebook, but the President of the United States himself. 

CNN explained how Trump ‘filled his first 100 days back in office with the same relentless lying and inaccuracy that was a hallmark of his first’. His lies move from ‘consequential policy matters to ‘trivial personal fixations’ with a ‘a core batch of favoured falsehoods again and again’. Trump’s second administration has been marked with the creation of a ‘machinery of misinformation’ on the government’s webpages, press conferences and press releases. The official webpages on covid now propagate the lab leak theory. 

Further clouding the barrage of lies, is the fact that Trump consistently accuses others of lying and claims to be uniquely open. The new lab leak pages were accompanied with the claim ‘This administration prioritizes transparency over all else’ while the Biden White House had ‘mislead the American people’ and resorted to ‘outright censorship—coercing and colluding…to censor all COVID-19-related dissent’. 

Why? 

The big question, then, is why? All of this done in a chaotic way, with many groups seemingly ‘working towards Trump’. Clearly, this anti-information assault supports the administration’s wider policies: RFK’s secrecy and obfuscation joins up neatly with his war on science and public health protection, and can be viewed alongside his threats to bar government scientists from publishing in leading medical journals. It also supports their anti-democratic agenda. This piece on Trump’s ‘big lie’ on 2020 explained how the lie served numerous purposes allowing him to ‘dominate other Republicans (as a test of loyalty)’, while giving him leverage to ‘reform election systems, and contest future elections’.

But no one can truly believe that the US government can be really blacked out or taken apart. Judges have ordered the government to restore lost data while various groups, from scientists to campaigners, have rescued information in a game of database whack-a-mole. A list of Sanctuary cities was taken down after complaints from Sheriffs. So why is this being done?

The first motive is to simply make it more difficult to find information and data. Like China’s Great Firewall, deletion creates a kind of politics of inconvenience, a higher bar to reach. It makes any scrutiny, investigation or accountability that much harder, and adds a layer of discouragement and difficulty. Trump’s removal of all official transcripts simply makes it harder, and more time consuming, to find out what he really said. 

More subtly, it has a political effect on voters. It removes climate change or trans rights, at least a little, from voters’ minds, while filling the space with lies. Historical research on Nazi Germany shows how the barrage of lies and misinformation from the Nazis didn’t change minds. But propaganda did work to reinforce prejudices for some while, as Hannah Arendt argued, putting others off politics all together. This headline found that the changes to the CDC website created ‘confusion and dismay’. This an ideal feeling to create in your opponents. 

The second motive could be, of course, self-deception. The first person you need lie to, above all, is yourself. It is possible they simply can’t bear to see some data on a world they dislike, and out of sight is out of mind. This may seem a stretch, but the long story of US involvement in Vietnam was simply an exercise is deep self-denial.  There’s very clearly a problem with information flows in the White House. There was a recent claim that Trump’s daily briefings were to be done in news ways, due to Trump’s poor attention span, ‘possibly’ by ‘creating a video version of the PDB that’s made to look and feel like a Fox News broadcast’. 

Third, darker reason is that the Trump regime is trying to create its own alternative reality. This may sound a little far-fetched, but Nazi Germany and Stalin’s USSR were marked by their attempt to create their own ‘moral universe’. Neither truly succeeded but they arguably did enough to sow confusion. 

How far is Trump from this? This article concluded that Trump’s lying ‘echoes a dynamic typically observed in authoritarian regimes, in which a charismatic leader creates blatant falsehoods to justify his hold on power and requires everyone to behave as if those lies are true’. 

The censorship, lies and disappearance create, like a jigsaw, an alternative universe where Trump won in 2020, climate change no longer exists, and the covid vaccines never worked. More chillingly, it’s a place where certain minority groups no longer exist in data or in the mind. 

This was the terrifying end point that numerous 20^th century writers warned about and which is behind the concerns of a new dark age. Hannah Arendt hoped, sometimes against hope, that facts and the truth will out. Others were less sure. Primo Levi wrote in the Drowned and the Saved of how the guards in Auschwitz would taunt the prisoners that ‘no one will ever believe this happened’. And Orwell, in perhaps the most famous scene in 1984, had Winston Smith pleading with O’Brien to confirm the existence of Big Brother:

“Does Big Brother exist?"

"Of course he exists. The Party exists. Big Brother is the embodiment of the Party."

"Does he exist in the same way as I exist?"

"You do not exist.”

Much of Trump’s information assault seems chaotic, incompetent and incomplete. But underneath the froth lurks a deeper threat. Information is power, and information removed is power weakened. Trump’s war on information threatens to take away the fundamental right of the citizen, as Orwell again put it, to state facts: ‘Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.'

Featured image is the National Archives