The Sunday shows saw the continuation of Republican efforts to delegitimize both 1.) all non-conservative political opponents and 2.) facts themselves. Team Trump's budget director took to the airwaves to claim the Obama administration was faking the nation's unemployment rate.
"What you should really look at is the number of jobs created," Mulvaney said on "State of the Union." "We've thought for a long time, I did, that the Obama administration was manipulating the numbers, in terms of the number of people in the workforce, to make the unemployment rate -- that percentage rate -- look smaller than it actually was."
We seem to be long past the point where blandly accusing parts of or the entirety of American government to be conspiring to make Republicans look bad is considered either unusual or deranged, but let's at least note that this claim by Mulvaney is a recitation of his conspiracy-addled boss' identical claims. Trump asserted during the campaign that the "real" unemployment rate was more than 40 percent of the population, a number he arrived at because Some Guy Said So, and a number that includes school-age children as "unemployed" because why the hell aren't they out working the coal mines like good little boys and girls?
And then Trump sat down in the Oval Office and declared that the precise same unemployment statistics he declared to be a horrible fraud the previous quarter were, despite barely changing at all, now True because he said so. So yes, the man is pathological. More to the point, he has surrounded himself only with people willing to parrot his own conspiracy theories, which is why Mick Mulvaney is now on your television opining on things as a budget director as opposed opining on things as Republican House member, or trying to cheat you out of your spare change by feigning incompetence from behind the register of a local fast food joint.
Indeed, he made the rounds on Sunday to lie about plenty of other things as well.
In a separate ABC News interview, Mulvaney was asked about the upcoming Congressional Budget Office’s estimate on the Republican health care plan. “I love the folks at the CBO. They work really hard. They do,” he said. “But sometimes we ask them to do stuff they aren’t capable of doing. And estimating the impact of a bill of this size probably isn’t the best use of their time.”
But of course, this is literally the purpose of the CBO. It is what they do. It is why they exist. No matter—the new Republican declaration is that you can't trust them either, because they're expected to come up with budget costs for the new Republican health care plan that reflect the actual, objective costs, rather than simply declaring whatever Republicans desire as their plan to be the One True Way.
This isn't just Trump. This is the whole party. Paul Ryan, Mulvaney—these people didn't hatch out of eggs the moment the electoral votes were tallied last November. The Republicans have been cultivating the conspiracy mindset that declares all of government and all non-conservative voices to be illegitimate for decades. It is why Fox News is Fox News. It is why Sean Hannity is on the radio. It is why Republicans refused the Democratic president a Supreme Court pick, and why they declared him to be possibly not a real American before that, and why Jade Helm catapulted from a frothing conspiracy theory believed only by morons to an "event" the Republican governor of Texas had to personally address.
The notion that you can't believe government statistics or government agencies until and unless they receive a stamp of approval from your party's partisan hacks is authoritarian drivel. It's also evidence that your party's ideas and policies are not reality-based to begin with—but that, too, is par for the new Republican course.