Catherine Rampell: The Trump administration’s war on statistics is now threatening lives

First, they came for the unemployment rate, and we brushed it off as tinfoil-hat nonsense.Then they came for crowd sizes, and we laughed at the absurdity.The next victim was the deficit, which they said was shrinking even as we saw it rising; also climate data, which they denigrated, doctored or disappeared without a trace. But we said, eh, they always do that, no big deal.They purged the data-crunchers who tabulate crop prices and other agricultural statistics, and we ignored it because we were