Don’t Shoot the Messenger

—Unless You’re Trump

Last week, Donald Trump fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Why? Because she told the truth.

The jobs report wasn’t flattering — not for him, anyway. So, rather than address the underlying economic concerns, he lashed out at the messenger. It’s a move straight out of the autocrat’s playbook: if the news makes you look bad, punish the person who dared to deliver it.

This isn’t new behavior, but it is deeply dangerous. “Don’t shoot the messenger” is more than a folksy phrase. It’s a warning, one rooted in thousands of years of hard-earned wisdom. In Sophocles’ Antigone, written around 440 BC, a character says, “No man delights in the bearer of bad news.” Even back then, people understood that blaming the messenger was a coward’s reflex — and a despot’s tell.

“No man delights in the bearer of bad news.” — Sophocles The brutal fate of a truth-teller at the hands of power. A timeless warning against punishing the messenger when the message is inconvenient.

But Trump isn’t just firing civil servants for telling the truth. He’s also doing his damnedest to bury truths that implicate him. Case in point: Jeffrey Epstein. If you read my earlier essay on the MAGA crowd’s selective outrage, you’ll remember how loudly they screamed about sex trafficking — unless it pointed back to Mar-a-Lago. They’ll chant “Save the children” while ignoring the actual children abused by Epstein’s network, and the powerful men who enabled it.

Now Trump has quietly moved Ghislaine Maxwell — Epstein’s longtime accomplice — to a minimum-security prison. Why? No one’s saying. But it reeks of a quid pro quo. It reeks of someone making sure she stays comfortable… and silent.

These stories do make headlines — at least in newsrooms that still practice journalism. But for the MAGA faithful, it doesn’t matter. Truth has become optional. Everything is a hoax, a witch hunt, or the deep state coming for their guy. They don’t want information — they want affirmation. They don’t want to know what Maxwell knows, or who she could name unless they are democrats. Not if it’s Trump, because the answer might pop their red-capped bubble.

Steve Bannon once said the strategy was to “flood the zone with shit.” And with Trump, there’s a river of it. Enough that someone should probably call FEMA — oh wait, he gutted that too. The goal is clear: overwhelm the public with so much chaos, so many scandals, so many norm-shattering stunts that people just… tune out. Get numb. Give up. That’s how authoritarianism thrives — not through brute force at first, but through exhaustion.

Here’s the thing: firing a statistician doesn’t change the statistics. And pampering an accomplice doesn’t erase the crimes. But it does send a message. It tells every truth-teller in government, in journalism, in public life: “Lie for me, or you’re next.”

And that’s the danger. Because once the messengers are gone — silenced, fired, discredited, or just too afraid to speak — we stop getting the message. The truth still exists, but it dies unheard.

So yeah, don’t shoot the messenger. But more importantly — protect them. Because without them, all we have left is propaganda, chaos… and the guy swinging the sword.