Trump's War On Facts  

I figured The Borowitz Report may have been a little premature claiming that George W Bush was very relieved he would no longer be the worst US president in history once Donald Trump was inaugurated, however after 5 days in the job I think Trump is getting close to taking the honour (unlike Bush he hasn't invaded any other countries yet so it's still line ball, though apparently he is threatening to invade Chicago).

Listing all of Trump's violations of decency and common sense would be tedious but one unpleasant aspect of this American experiment with authoritarianism which stands out already is his continual war on the truth, starting with the bizarre attempts to deny that the attendance at his inauguration ceremony was far lower than that of previous presidents (not to mention the massive anti-Trump protests the following day) and the creation of the phrase "alternative facts" to describe Trump administration lies.

While it is common for dictators to lie about topics which reflect poorly upon them (they also like to declare weird national holidays like Trump's "National Day of Patriotic Devotion, which I initially thought was satire - apparently Trump is following Kim Jong Il's playbook as much as he is Vladimir Putin's) the speed at which the Trump administration is moving to push scientific facts down the memory hole (one of the many apropros concepts from George Orwell's 1984 which will come in handy during the Trump era) is staggering.

After starting with a purge of the White House web site (eliminating all mention of climate change and clean energy, along with other annoyances like civil rights and the Spanish language version of the site), the administration has quickly moved on to removing references to climate change from the EPA web site and telling government employees they cannot release information to the media or the public without having it vetted for political correctness first. The functions of the EPA seem to have been pretty much suspended as well, no doubt as the first step towards dismantling federal environmental protection programs completely (as they are an obstacle to keeping US consumers hooked on fossil fuels for as long as they last).

On the plus side, the fear of Trumpist censorship led to a carnival of climate data archiving over the past month, and the administration's heavy handed censorship of official Twitter accounts has sparked a boom in rogue government Tweeters that are now far more popular than the official accounts (with special mention going to the folks at the Badlands National Park).

The science community is now organising it's own protest marches against Trump, with a march on Washington planned in the coming weeks.

Whether or not Trump is still in office at that point can't be certain, with his recent performance in a TV interview prompting a lot of pundits to wonder if he'll be bounced out of office by his own cabinet under the 25th amendment section covering situations where the president is no longer fit for office. That's if the CIA (allegedly unimpressed with his cheer squad disrespecting their hallowed ground) don't assassinate him first of course...