Preview
In a reflective letter from April 2063, Skyler recounts a period when crucial data ceased to be available. Government actions under Trump’s leadership caused this issue. It resulted in a weakening of civic discourse and a loss of shared reality. The once-reliable Bureau of Labor Statistics dashboard, along with other vital data sources, went dark, leading to confusion and misinformation. Skyler emphasizes the importance of data in democracy. She warns against the erosion of truth. She advocates for the need to reconstruct both institutions and the capacity to understand societal issues.
This is the first of several posts. These posts will focus on the wars that Trump and his sycophants are waging on Americans.
Atlanta, April 2063
Dear Jack,1
I was eight the last time the numbers were real.
Every Friday, my mother would check the Bureau of Labor Statistics dashboard. She did this the way some families checked the weather. She was quiet and anxious, with a hand on the mouse and a furrow in her brow. The numbers told her how many people had lost work that week. They showed how fast prices were rising. The data revealed whether the rent hikes were outpacing wages again. It was her way of listening for distant thunder. Today, nevertheless, the BLS dashboard is not updating information because of the Republican led government shutdown.
The dashboard went dark the spring Trump returned to power. At first we thought it was just another funding fight, like the ones that had knocked websites offline before. But weeks passed, and the updates never came back. My mother kept refreshing the page for months, like a ritual for a ghost.
By the end of that summer, more pages were vanishing. Climate dashboards froze mid-storm season. Food insecurity surveys were “postponed indefinitely.” Vaccine data disappeared without explanation. By winter, it was as if the country had decided to stop looking at itself in the mirror.
They called it austerity. They said it was about cutting “red tape” and “freeing the agencies from bloated bureaucracy.” But everyone could feel the chill. It wasn’t just numbers that were being cut. It was the nerves that told us where the pain was.
We didn’t realize it at the time. This was how the silence began. It began not with censorship in the usual sense but with a subtraction of knowledge.
When the data stopped, arguments stopped making sense. People clung to whatever numbers their preferred networks fed them, like castaways grabbing driftwood. One station would say unemployment was rising; another insisted we were in a “golden age.” Both cited “official sources,” but the sources were gone, hollowed out or replaced by Trump’s loyalists.
At school, the teachers tried to explain inflation, but the charts they used were months out of date. Some parents started printing memes as evidence. Others stopped trusting the schools entirely.
Looking back, it’s astonishing how quickly civic discourse disintegrated once the shared factual floor cracked. We had thought democracy died in coups or riots. Instead, it died in data voids—quiet gaps that widened into abysses.
My father used to call it “the silence before the storm.” Storms were his touchstone for everything. He said the scariest part wasn’t the wind or the rain. It was the moment the air went unnaturally still. You realized the warning systems had failed.
That silence descended over our public life. When pollution monitoring sites shut down, a chemical spill in Savannah went undetected for weeks. By the time the numbers surfaced through a university backchannel, children were already sick. When the food insecurity survey was cut, hunger surged invisibly. Relief programs couldn’t track where the need was worst.
And when climate data went dark, the storms didn’t stop. They just stopped being predictable. The year the NOAA dashboards froze was the year the Atlantic hurricanes changed course mid-season. Thousands died inland, where no one expected them.
The silence didn’t come from ignorance. It came from a deliberate decision to turn off the lights.
I know you study this era, Jack, so you know the official explanations: budget cuts, “efficiency reforms,” sovereignty rhetoric. But those were just alibis. Trump understood something that too many defenders of democracy underestimated: data is power. Whoever controls the ability to measure reality controls the terms of debate.
His war on data wasn’t chaotic—it was methodical. Fire the agency heads who produce inconvenient statistics. Defund the surveys that expose inequality. Gut the climate monitors that contradict your conspiracies. Let loyal media amplify your alternate “facts.” Over time, the shared reality collapses, and the strongman narrative becomes the only stable frame left.
It’s easy to underestimate this strategy because it’s so banal. There are no dramatic decrees, just quiet budget lines and withdrawn reports. But authoritarianism often enters through the side door, not the front gates.
When I teach my students about this period now, I don’t start with the insurrections or the constitutional crises. I start with the dashboards. I tell them: democracy is not just ballots and speeches. It’s databases and spreadsheets. Quiet civil servants measure the world with care.
Once those measurements stop, everything else begins to drift.
You asked me in your last letter whether the silence was inevitable. I don’t think it was. There were people who tried to fight it. Scientists archived datasets before they disappeared. States formed alliances to collect vaccine data. Journalists sounded alarms. But their efforts were fragmented, heroic but scattered. The federal data infrastructure had been built over a century. Nonprofits and grad students with backup servers can’t replace it overnight.
In the end, the silence spread faster than resistance coalesces.
The storms, of course, followed. Political storms. Economic storms. Literal ones. invasive storms.
But by then, the silence had done its work.
I’m telling you all this not because you don’t know it. You’re a writing about the Trump era. You probably have more footnotes on this era than I have living memories. I want you to feel what it was like from the inside. It didn’t feel like a coup. It felt like forgetting. And, it felt like standing in a room. The lights dim gradually. Everyone argues about whether it’s really getting darker.
Jack, if there’s one lesson from that time, it’s this: truth doesn’t disappear all at once. It erodes, dataset by dataset, until arguments become noise and power fills the vacuum.
That’s why the reconstruction you’re part of now matters so deeply. Rebuilding institutions is one thing. Rebuilding the shared capacity to see ourselves is another.
With resolve, Skyler
- I received this letter today from Skyler Fusaro, a character I created decades ago. She writes from the future to help us reflect on the history we are creating now. ↩︎
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