Trump could usher in a golden age of government transparency and disclosure
The most memorable moment from when Robert F. Kennedy Jr. joined Donald Trump on stage for the first time on Aug. 24 to endorse the GOP candidate and join forces was his debut of the phrase “Make America Healthy Again.” But an important announcement preceded RFK stepping up to the mic.
Trump took the opportunity to reveal “a tribute in honor of Bobby,” who had come out to uproarious applause minutes earlier. “I will establish a new independent presidential commission on assassination attempts, and they will be tasked with releasing all of the remaining documents pertaining to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy,” he told the crowd. Another massive standing ovation ensued.
“They will also conduct a rigorous review of the attack last month,” Trump continued, referring to the assassination attempt on his own life in Butler, Pennsylvania.
In all the appointments and nominations since Trump won the election, we have yet to hear a follow-up about this commission. But Trump’s statement did signal an element of the next term that’s encouraging for fans of transparency.
In many of Trump’s appointments, including Kennedy himself as the next head of Health and Human Services, we’ve seen a renegade vibe emerge. The nominations are meant to shake up and disrupt each of their respective agencies, including former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard as director of National Intelligence, former Rep. Matt Gaetz as attorney general and Fox News host and veteran Pete Hegseth as defense secretary.
An inward shake-up is alluring and necessary to fix these bloated blobs of bureaucracy. But a Trump presidency that also prioritizes an outward recalibration focused on disclosure and declassification would be a true victory for American citizens.
In recent years, we’ve seen a chilling of free speech and the free flow of information to the public. Elected and unelected bureaucrats display an overarching distrust of the American people. Anti-speech activists have risen in the establishment media, cheerleading for censorship — and doing so in collusion with social media companies and government agencies.
Making all the JFK assassination documents public is a good first step, and it’s frankly something Trump should have done in his first term. But with RFK Jr. standing by his side, Trump explicitly promised to do it this time. And exposing all of the facts of the Butler assassination attempt must be a priority.
But this should just be the beginning.
If Trump’s picks can get into place, they can help lead the charge in reestablishing trust with the public through disclosure. With Hegseth at the Pentagon, he can shed light on the truth about UFOs. While Congress has a shown a greater interest recently in exploring this important national defense topic, it continues to be met with resistance from those who hold the power to keep facts declassified and away from the public. Trump has said he supports further transparency on UAPs, particularly during his podcast media tour this year.
Kennedy overseeing the Centers for Disease Control, the Food and Drug Administration and the National Institutes of Health would be encouraging for how we might respond to a future pandemic, but we shouldn’t let those who lied about so many elements of COVID-19 off the hook either. He can spearhead an effort to finally bring the public the truth about the origins of the pandemic, and expose what the so-called experts were really saying behind the scenes.
Gabbard as director of National Intelligence can use her oversight of the FBI and CIA to do the job that the sham Jan. 6 House Committee was never actually interested in — getting to the bottom of what happened that day, from the security failures to the true scope of government informants to who planted the bombs outside the offices of the Republican and Democratic National Committee buildings DNC.
Gaetz at the Department of Justice can dig into what coordination may have occurred related to the “lawfare” campaign against Trump over the past several years. Hegseth can oversee an effort to truly assess what went wrong with the botched Afghanistan withdrawal, and see if there were missed opportunities to end the Russia-Ukraine war.
In each of these cases, just learning the truth isn’t enough — Trump’s team must tell the truth to the American people, who have been lied to and spun a narrative on so many important issues for far too long.
This isn’t about retribution. It would be a waste of time for the new administration to focus its actions on the past rather than the future. Rather, it’s about trusting Americans to know the truth about the country they live in.
An immediate test of transparency under Trump comes with the House Ethics Committee report about Gaetz himself. Because Gaetz resigned his congressional office immediately after being nominated for attorney general, the finished report remains in limbo. House Speaker Mike Johnson said that releasing the report when Gaetz is no longer a House member would be “a terrible breach of protocol and tradition and the spirit of the rule.”
Yesterday, the committee, which is evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans, deadlocked on releasing the report. Gaetz should consider releasing it himself, in order to prove that Trump 2.0 takes transparency seriously. We know it will get leaked eventually anyway.
For Trump to Make America Great Again, he needs to trust the American people — and lead a government that trusts us to handle the truth.
Steve Krakauer, a NewsNation contributor, is the author of “Uncovered: How the Media Got Cozy with Power, Abandoned Its Principles, and Lost the People” and editor and host of the Fourth Watch newsletter and podcast.
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