Trump moving to 'delete' people he doesn't like from govt data: analysis

President Donald Trump has adopted a peculiar and dangerous pattern in his second term, wrote Amanda Shendruk and Catherine Rampell for The Washington Post in an analysis published on Friday: moving to "delete" entire categories of people he doesn't like or want to acknowledge from federal data whenever possible.

"For example, when the Defense Department was asked to cull all DEI-related content from its websites, it removed approximately 26,000 images," they wrote. "A list of the deleted photos was given to the Associated Press. About 19,000 of them included descriptions, and our analysis found that 4 out of 5 depicted women, people in the LGBTQ+ community and racial minorities."

Almost half of the deleted images included racial minorities, the report found.

"This is part of a broader campaign to delete the statistical and visual evidence of undesirables, or at least those who may not fit into President Donald Trump’s conception of the new American 'golden age,'" they wrote. "Entire demographics are being scrubbed from records of both America’s past and present — including people of color, transgender people, women, immigrants and people with disabilities. They are now among America’s 'missing persons.'"

All of this comes at a moment when the Trump administration is also seeking to rename and redefine everything around him, changing the Gulf of Mexico to the "Gulf of America," undoing the military's decision to take Confederate names off of bases, and most recently moving to strip the names of civil rights leaders like Harvey Milk and Harriet Tubman from Naval ships.

"Everyday Americans who happen to be nonwhite have been deleted from federal datasets and indexes designed to inform government preparations for emergencies. Some government mapping tools that involve race have been taken down entirely," the report continued. "In response to an executive order banning DEI, some federal agencies now forbid the recognition of Black History Month and employeeaffinity groups. And keywords such as 'Black,' 'ethnicity' and 'indigenous' have appeared on lists of banned words for public communications and scientific grants."

Even poor people appear to be being marked for deletion, Shendruk and Rampell wrote: the administration fired the Health and Human Services team responsible for calculating poverty guidelines, and eliminated the Social Security Administration's Disability Analysis File. "Perhaps if we never define or quantify poverty, the administration seems to believe, poor people would cease to exist — and therefore would no longer be entitled to safety-net services," they wrote.

All of this, they wrote, is one of the least popular things the administration is doing, with polls overwhelmingly showing opposition to removing diversity and keywords acknowledging it from websites, State Department reports, or posters on government buildings.

"And why would Americans support this?" they concluded. "Most people see themselves in at least one of these groups — and they want to be seen by their government, too."