This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2016, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
Whom are you going to believe, Donald Trump or your own lying eyes?
Trump is hoping the answer is Trump.
At an event in Fresno on Friday, the presumptive Republican nominee had the gall to declare that California's severe four-year drought was a figment of voters' imaginations.
Never mind the record-low levels of Sierra snowpack last year, which, through runoff, provide about a third of the water used by the state's cities and farms. Never mind that snowpack conditions across California stand at 29 percent of their normal levels. Never mind that the last two years were California's hottest on record.
Never mind that there were record numbers of acres claimed by wildfires and of tree deaths nationwide last year, in large part because of years of dry conditions out west.
Nope. Trump ignores all these obvious symptoms of severe drought. Instead, he blames the state's entire water shortage on an environmental program to save a fish.
Note that Trump was not merely criticizing the government's response to a natural-resource scarcity (as have many on both left and right); he was claiming there was no scarcity to begin with.
Quoth Trump: "There is no drought," further explaining that the water shortage is just a manufactured crisis created by a pro-environmentalist conspiracy.
This attack on empiricism is not exactly an unusual stance for the presumptive Republican nominee.
Just a few days earlier, Trump returned to another hobbyhorse of his: a claim that the unemployment data were doctored, too. Anyone who believes the Labor Department's headline unemployment rate of 5 percent is a "dummy," Trump declared to the New York Post last week.
His was not the nuanced criticism some economists have made, that the headline unemployment number doesn't tell the whole story because it excludes two groups of workers: those who want jobs but have given up looking and those who want more hours but can't find them. If these additional groups of workers were factored in, they would indeed bump up the jobless rate by several percentage points.
We know this because the Labor Department actually reports those alternative measures of labor underutilization, too.
But Trump declares that even these numbers are fake.
The true unemployment rate, he claims, is quadruple what the government tells us, closer to 20 percent. The evidence, he told the New York Post, is not in any research or formal data collection he's done or seen, but merely the strong attendance at his own rallies.
As part of his war on data, Trump pledged to "investigate" these government-produced numbers, presumably also for signs that the Labor Department lackeys are cooking the books.
It's easy to mock Trump for denying reality. But in truth, he is hardly a pioneer in the postmodernist political effort to create parallel universes of facts.
For years the right-wing commentariat has deliberately dismantled public trust in major U.S. institutions, including government and the "mainstream media." Media narratives are always skewed against conservative causes, they say, as are any standardized tools of policy analysis or fact-checking. (Meanwhile, major media organizations have doubled down on their self-proclaimed roles as impartial arbiters of truth, investing more resources in "data-driven" analysis and fact-checking operations ahead of this election.)
Conservative pundits have politicized some of the most apolitical subjects possible — math and science — through an array of arithmetically creative tax proposals and bogus attacks on climate change. Republican legislators have repeatedly cut funding for U.S. statistical agencies, upon which both policymakers and private businesses rely for objective information about the world around them.
The noble federal bean counters who tally up local temperatures, or census surveys on employment status, or data on consumer prices, are not political appointees; they are humble scientists, academic researchers and civil servants who serve in administrations of both major political parties. Yet they, too, have been vilified as mustache-twirling accomplices of a power-hungry, secret-Muslim, Kenyan-born Democratic despot.
Given these precedents, is it really so shocking that Trump has conjured up a few inches of imaginary rainfall?
It's certainly in his interest to smear any source of information (including looking out your own window) that isn't Donald J. Trump. In discrediting any rival and possibly neutral arbiter of truth and accountability — that is, entitling himself to his own facts as well as his own opinions — Trump achieves two important objectives. First, he frees himself up to invent colorful problems, conspiracies and villains that only a President Trump can defeat.
And second, he robs the public of any independent means of assessing whether he's ever actually succeeded.
Twitter, @crampell