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For weeks, the headlines have looked like Groundhog Day:
Trump sues a newspaper (Wall Street Journal) over an Epstein letter.
Justice tries to “unseal” grand-jury files, then hints at sweeping redactions.
A jobs report lands, and the president fires the messenger.
Inspectors-general vanish overnight, law firms lose clearances, data portals go dark.
Same choreography. Same motive: erase the receipts before they erase him.
1. The Epstein Files: Stage-Managed Secrecy
DOJ is asking courts to release grand-jury materials “where possible,” while openly planning to redact (black out) whole sections. Legal experts say the public may see little more than a table of contents.
🗂️ The Files May Not Please You: Politico
Trump’s denial-and-deflect routine makes sense only if a disclosure poses a threat to him. And history says that when Trump panics, he reaches for the Sharpie. I’ve seen the scrambling up close. I was in the White House when Trump world realized the public might see something they couldn’t control, be it a memo, a meeting summary, or a name on a list. I watched the inner circle pivot into damage-control mode: calls flying, loyalty tested, and narratives rewritten in real-time.
2. Fire the Facts
July’s soft jobs report (73k jobs, rising unemployment) prompted Trump to sack Bureau of Labor Statistics Commissioner Erika McEntarfer within hours, calling the data “RIGGED.” Economic truth wasn’t friendly, so economic truth-tellers were axed. Also, can he get a tutor and a dictionary and work on expanding his vocabulary? It’s old and tired.
📉 Rigged Is Not An Economic Term: CNBC
3. The Watchdog Massacre
Less than a week into his second term, the administration fired 17 inspectors general, the very people who document waste, fraud, and abuse.
🚪 Watchdogs Down: American Oversight
4. Lawyers, Disbarred by Decree
A February string of executive orders stripped major D.C. law firms—including my own attorney’s, Mark Zaid—of security clearances and federal contracts simply for representing Trump critics. Message received: defend the rule of law, lose your livelihood.
🧾 (Lawyers? Loyalty Only: Newsweek)
5. “Preventing Woke AI”
The July 23 executive order bans federal use of any model that acknowledges systemic racism or gender diversity. Agencies must purge “ideological bias” from procurement lists. Translation: code that flatters power stays; code that mirrors reality goes.
🤖 (Don't Be Smart or Woke: The White House)
6. Vanishing Data, Gagged Science
8,000+ CDC, EPA, NASA, and HHS webpages were yanked in January to comply with anti-DEI orders.
A federal judge had to order HHS to restore basic public-health pages in February.
NOAA delayed the cutoff of key satellite streams that warn farmers about drought and hurricanes, and elsewhere, quietly retired multiple long-standing climate data products, including the Billion-Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters database, which NOAA confirmed will no longer be updated past 2024.
When information contradicts the narrative, the narrative wins.
🗑️ Science Doesn't Poll Well When You're Hurting People:The Verge, NPR, The Daily Beast, NOAA
7. A Justice Department Recast as Personal Weapon
Legal scholars warn the DOJ now functions as an “enforcer of presidential vendettas,” firing career prosecutors tied to past Trump probes and opening new cases against perceived enemies.
⚖️ (From Justice to Just Us: The Guardian)
8. Oh. Yeah. Back to Epstein: Trump’s Name Removed from Epstein Files
In an internal FBI review, agents specifically redacted the name of Donald Trump (alongside other high-profile individuals) from Jeffrey Epstein-related documents before any public release. This wasn’t “privacy,” it was preemptive erasure.The DOJ later defended it under FOIA privacy rules, but insiders say the process was driven by politics, not procedure.
⚫️ Trump’s Name? Redacted: Bloomberg, Jason Leopold
9. COVID Files Still Sealed
Much of the internal 2020 COVID guidance, NSC-originated warnings, and pandemic intelligence memos remain classified or buried, especially the parts where public health was overruled for politics. I sat in those meetings. I watched critical guidance delayed, watered down, or outright blocked, because it didn’t fit the president’s narrative. Reports went missing. Talking points were rewritten. And science was treated like a political liability, not a lifeline. Millions of Americans died. Something I will never forget. (Has anyone seen the gigantic binders that were on my desk that Trump’s lawyers freaked out about when they realized I had documented everything?) That moment wasn’t an outlier, it was the beta test. Everything you’re seeing now started then.
🧬 Science? Yeah, We Redacted That Too: House Oversight Committee,
10. A Presidency Designed to Disappear, Literally
Historians and watchdogs warn this may be one of the least-documented presidencies in modern U.S. history. Key omissions (and I’m not even scratching the surface here) include:
Deletion of thousands of federal webpages,
Auto-deleting messaging platforms like Signal, and
Resistance to formal record-keeping under the Presidential Records Act. (Let’s not forget that Archivist Colleen Shogan was removed, and many official visitors to Trump properties remain unlogged.)
🛑 This Presidency Will Not Be Archived: AP News
The Pattern in Plain Sight
Discredit the data or the whistle-blower.
Fire the independent overseer.
Rewrite the rules (or the code) so only the flattering version remains.
Threaten or sue anyone who publishes or publicly states the inconvenient.
Epstein is just the loudest flare in this pattern. Jobs numbers, watchdogs, scientists, and now entire AI models are being shoved into the same black box because transparency is lethal to an administration built on grievance and leverage.
Trump doesn’t merely fear prosecution; he fears documentation. Every statistic buried, every website scrubbed, every file redacted is another brick in a wall between the public and the truth. And you know what’s really telling–on some of these topics, Republicans are silent. They know what's happening, but they're scared, and given what's happening here to our country, dare I say, they're being selfish?
If we let that wall stand, the next scandal, whether it involves Epstein or not, will arrive pre-censored, framed, and forgotten.
Speaking of the authoritarian playbook and Groundhog Day, "Watch out for that first step, it's a doozy."
And doozy it is. The Trump team is carpet-bombing with frivolous lawsuits and harassment, playing perpetual victim while cashing in and clawing for relevance despite their own breathtaking incompetence. I’ll share about how this is impacting me personally soon…
Just another day in the life of a truth teller,
Olivia
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