The White House and Republicans are bracing for bad news in the Congressional Budget Office score of the new GOP health plan, which could come as early as Monday. It is expected to find that the GOP effort — which President Trump has endorsed — could leave many millions without coverage, and on the Sunday shows, top Trump advisers sought to discredit the CBO’s finding in advance.

But all of this should be seen in a much larger context. We’re seeing a broad White House effort to corrode the very ideal of reality-based governing, something that includes not just a discrediting of institutions such as the CBO but also the weakening of the influence of science and data over agency decision-making and the deliberate misuse of our democracy’s institutional processes to prop up Trump’s lies about his popular support and political opponents.

-snip-

By itself, this might not be all that outlandish — there is a long history of such stuff — but it needs to be placed in the larger context. There is Conway’s off-the-wall depiction above of the purpose of congressional investigations. Meanwhile, when Trump got called out for the lie that he won the popular vote but for millions who voted illegally, the White House threatened an investigation to prove it true, using the vow of probes as a tool to obfuscate efforts to hold him accountable. On Friday, Sean Spicer greeted the good February jobs report by claiming that the numbers “may have been phony in the past” — when they reflected job growth during the Obama presidency that Trump derided as fictional — but now they’re “very real.” Government data is real only when Trump says it is. Everyone had a good laugh over this, but at the risk of being very earnest, government data is supposed to inform policymaking.

Scott Pruitt, the new head of the Environmental Protection Agency, has now clarified that he does not accept the scientific consensus that human activity is the primary cause of global warming, which could put the agency’s agenda directly at odds with the laws and regulations it’s supposed to enforce. The White House has explicitly said the new version of Trump’s travel ban is designed in part to demonstrate that his national security power “will not be questioned,” and when a leaked Department of Homeland Security assessment undercut the substantive case for the ban, a senior administration official said: “This is not the intelligence assessment the president asked for.” We have not seen the one that he has asked for, however.

We need a new vocabulary to describe what we’re seeing here.