Trump Tracker Day 4 - Deeper signals persist. Hopefully they will grow.

Totals for today’s 27 stories are 17 noise, 4 signal 1, 1 signal 2, 1 signal 3, and 4 normal. If you haven’t yet read how the Trump tracker works and what the true signals are, please read this article.

The big news yesterday in the tracker was signal 2: Trump is destroying American democracy, appeared with 2 stories. The press is starting to report more signal and deeper signal. But alas, today there was only 1 signal 2 story. This was balanced by the return of signal 3: Trump is siding with Putin on the Russian/Ukraine war, though there was only one story on that.

The way the above is written implies the tracker is highly accurate. It’s not. We’re averaging 27 stories per day from the Ground News US Politics feed, which has about 170 stories per day. To begin to say the tracker is even somewhat accurate, we’d need to include all 170 stories. That’s currently impossible because we are manually creating each day’s tracker article, instead of using AI.

A small test shows ChatGPT, which appears to be the most capable AI assistant, cannot do the creative original reasoning required to classify stories, or write them up suitably. Hopefully this will change with further testing. If you have expertise here, we could really use some help.

But even with including all 170 stories, how representative is the Ground News US Politics feed of the US population’s news consumption? Plus, we’re not weighting the stories for number of articles per story, which would be more accurate. Without that, a story published in only one news source gets as much weight as a story published in 300 news sources. This is a feature we hope to add in the future.

2. White House journalists use annual press dinner to celebrate First Amendment. Journalists are sounding the alarm that Trump is destroying democracy. Signal 2.

3. Shocked by US peace proposal, Ukrainians say they will not accept any formal surrender of Crimea. The latest US peace proposal is a capitulation of Ukaraine to Russia, because Trump is siding with Russia. Signal 3.

10. Market turmoil has many afraid to check retirement savings. Trump’s tariffs are beginning to take their toil on the economy. Signal 1.

21. Trump's 100-Day Approval Rating at Historic Low, New Polls Reveal. The poll reveals high concern with Trump’s impact on the US economy. Signal 1.

25. Trump’s Tariffs Stoke Fears of Shortages. This is all about damage to the US economy due to Trump’s actions. Signal 1.

26. Poll reveals mixed feelings on President Trump's first 100 days. The inevitable has come to pass. Trump’s actions are beginning to have consequences with voters, with most concerned about the economy. Signal 1.

1. Lawsuit says migrants endure isolation and intimidation at US' Guantanamo detention center

Noise - The distraction pattern is false common enemy, in this case immigrants. This very frequent pattern was described at length in an earlier tracker article.

55 articles - 94% high factuality - Ground News story.

2. White House journalists use annual press dinner to celebrate First Amendment

SIGNAL2 - If you understand the context of the story, it is all about signal 2: Trump is destroying American democracy.

A large banner above the head table at the dinner read “Celebrating the First Amendment,” which says:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

The annual dinner is organized by the White House Correspondents’ Association, who framed the dinner as a defense of journalism’s role in holding power accountable to the people, thereby safeguarding democracy. The reason they had to do this is the Trump administration and Republicans have been attacking the press for producing “fake news” and being “an enemy of the people”, when just the opposite is true. Trump and MAGA supporters view the press as heavily biased against conservatives, as pushing leftist narratives, and protecting Democratic politicians. But in fact, the press is just doing its job of reporting the truth.

47 articles - 80% high factuality - Ground News story.

3. Shocked by US peace proposal, Ukrainians say they will not accept any formal surrender of Crimea

SIGNAL3 - The story deals with signal 3: Trump is siding with Putin on the Russian/Ukraine war. The latest US peace proposal requires Ukraine to give up all Russian occupied land, bares Ukraine from joining NATO, cedes large control of Ukraine’s mineral resources to the US, and contains vague security guarentees. Germany's Defense Minister labeled it as "akin to a capitulation” to Russia.

48 articles - 88% high factuality - Ground News story.

4. JB Pritzker, a potential 2028 Democratic presidential candidate, headlines New Hampshire fundraiser

Normal - The story is about Pritzker positioning himself for a presidential run. Looking at the articles, a small part of their coverage is on the democracy part of signal 1: Trump is destroying American democracy and its economy. In his speech:

Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker sharply criticized fellow Democrats on Sunday for not doing enough to oppose President Donald Trump, drawing a clear divide between himself and other high-profile Democrats seen as future presidential contenders. …he also focused on what he says are shortcomings in his own party, assailing Democrats for listening to “a bunch of know-nothing political types” instead of everyday Americans.

Story coverage on signa 1 is so low that it’s normal political news, rather than signal.

78 articles - 95% high factuality - Ground News story.

5. Republican-led states keep adding school voucher programs even as critics worry about cost

Noise - The distraction pattern is lying to hide true behavior. Why are Republican-led states favoring school voucher programs while Democrat-led states are mostly not? This is a complex contentious issue. One reason is this is part of an effort to privatize as much as possible of what government does, which increases corporate profits and reduces regulation. A second reason is school vouchers encourage private charter schools over public schools. Private schools have more control over curriculum content, and thus can more easily bias that content toward whoever controls a school, whether it is self-managed, as about 60% are, or is managed by an external organization, which is often for-profit. A third reason is many private schools are religious schools. Vouchers increase their enrollment and reduce church and state separation.

These true intentions are cloaked under deceptive appeals like vouchers allow parents to choose the best education for their children, vouchers encourage schools to compete in quality in order to attract the most students, and parents should have the freedom to send their children to any school they want, not just (usually) the public school whose district they are in. (source1, source2)

33 articles - 100% high factuality - Ground News story.

6. FBI Arrest of Wisconsin Judge Sparks Judicial Backlash and Public Protests

Noise - The distraction pattern is false common enemy, in this case immigrants. This frequent pattern was described at length in an earlier tracker article. “Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Hannah Dugan was charged with two felonies for allegedly assisting an undocumented immigrant to evade arrest during a court appearance. Critics, including Wisconsin state Rep. Ryan Clancy, labeled Dugan's arrest as an attack on the judiciary and emphasized the importance of judicial independence against executive power.”

60 articles - 48% high factuality - Ground News story.

7. South Korea, US aim for trade package before tariff pause ends in July

Noise - The distraction pattern is Trump’s outrageous behavior. His high tariffs, imposed for no justifiable reason, will damage the US economy and the world’s. But the story is not about the damage, which is signal 1. It’s about trade talks.

26 articles - 84% high factuality - Ground News story.

8. IMF-World Bank meetings end with little tariff clarity, but economic foreboding

Noise - The distraction pattern is so common it’s the same as the above story. In addition to being about tariff talks, it’s about global economic foreboding. There is no emphasis on tariff damage to the US economy, so this is is noise instead of signal.

38 articles - 76% high factuality - Ground News story.

9. US forces deploy anti-ship missiles in Philippines and stage live-fire drills near China hot spots

Normal - Deployment of armed forces to hot spots is normal governance.

61 articles - 91% high factuality - Ground News story.

10. Market turmoil has many afraid to check retirement savings

SIGNAL1 - This covers the economy part of signal 1: Trump is destroying the American economy. All but one article is a re-post of the AP News article: “As the White House simultaneously injects turmoil into financial markets with its trade war and dismisses fears of a downturn, retired and near-retired Americans are anxiously looking on, worried about outliving their savings or having to put off entries on their bucket lists.”

19 articles - 100% high factuality - Ground News story.

11. As Musk gained power in Washington, his popularity has fallen, an AP-NORC poll finds

Noise - The distraction pattern is staff outrageous behavior. Elon Musk’s outrageous behavior as head of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency has masked what his government staff and program cuts have done: Rather than increasing efficiency, they destroy the US economy by reducing quality of government. The story is all about Musk’s popularity, not the signal.

97 articles - 97% high factuality - Ground News story.

12. Tech industry tried reducing AI's pervasive bias. Now Trump wants to end its 'woke AI' efforts

Noise - The distraction pattern is attack your enemies fallaciously. Per Wikipedia, “woke” originally met being awake to racial injustice, social inequality, and systemic oppression. But in the 2010s woke began to be used pejoratively to criticize excessive belief in those same values (also called political correctness), which reversed the meaning of the term. The enemy is those who believe in those values.

Before the 2010s woke met being aware enough. Now it means too aware. Formerly woke was good. Now it’s bad. The word has been corrupted and redefined to mean its opposite, a standard tactic of authoritarian propaganda programs as famously described in George Orwell’s 1984.

Trump’s “woke AI” turns the problem of accidental racial bias in AI products into a political problem that’s not actually there. For example, self-driving cars had a harder time detecting dark skinned people. An image generating program tended to produce more white person image than the normal percentage of whites in the population. Face-matching software misidentified Asian faces, and so on. (AP News) This is immature technology, not “woke AI”.

70 articles - 95% high factuality - Ground News story.

13. Tesla hikes Canadian prices and pushes its pre-tariff inventory

Noise - The distraction pattern is Trump’s outrageous behavior and staff outrageous behavior. Due to these behaviors, any news about Trump and Musk is notable news. Trump’s high tariffs on Canada have caused Musk to raise Tesla prices and to promote its pre-tariff inventory as a deal, before prices are raised. The story is all about this behavior, rather than the damaging effect of high tariffs on the US economy. Once again, the noise hides the signal.

28 articles - 85% high factuality - Ground News story.

14. Canada's election offers fodder for US right-wing influencers

Noise - The distraction pattern is false common enemy. Once again, the enemy is immigrants. This frequent pattern was described at length in an earlier tracker article. The story summary describes how this pattern is “misleading,” which is journalism’s way of diplomatically saying it a lie:

Right-wing US personalities who helped propel Donald Trump's 2024 electoral win have weighed in on Canada's upcoming election, with at-times misleading warnings about a range of political issues, including immigration.

31 articles - 93% high factuality - Ground News story.

15. President Trump’s 100-Day Interview with TIME Magazine

Noise - The distraction pattern is Trump’s outrageous behavior, so much so that the Time interview article says:

The first 100 days of his second term have been among the most destabilizing in American history, a blitz of power grabs, strategic shifts, and direct attacks that have left opponents, global counterparts, and even many supporters stunned.

This blitz is what we call lots of noise designed to hide a small amount of signal. The article then lists the blitz actions:

Trump has launched a battery of orders and memoranda that have hobbled entire government agencies and departments. He has threatened to take Greenland by force, seize control of the Panama Canal, and annex Canada. Weaponizing his control of the Justice Department, he has ordered investigations of political enemies. He has gutted much of the civil service, removing more than a hundred thousand federal workers. He has gone to war with institutions across American life: universities, media outlets, law firms, museums. He pardoned or gave a commutation to every single defendant charged in connection with the Jan. 6 attacks, including those convicted of violent acts and seditious conspiracy.

Seeking to remake the global economy, he triggered a trade war by unleashing a sweeping array of tariffs that sent markets plummeting. Embarking on his promised program of mass deportation, he has mobilized agencies across government, from the IRS to the Postal Service, as part of the effort to find, detain, and expel immigrants. He has shipped some of them to foreign countries without due process, citing a wartime provision from the 18th century. His Administration has snatched foreign students off the streets and stripped their visas for engaging in speech he dislikes. He has threatened to send Americans to a notorious prison in El Salvador.

And then the article says:

Says one senior Administration official: “Our success depends on his ability to shock you.”

Here “shock” is synomous with “outrageous behavior”. That is the official central strategy of how Trump hides his true intentions.

10 articles - 33% high factuality - Ground News story.

16. Federal government working to expand access to 'transformative' sickle cell treatments, HHS Secretary RFK Jr. says in Charleston

Normal - News about federal agency progress is normal news.

7 articles - 100% high factuality - Ground News story.

17. Venezuela Denounces ‘Child Theft’ by US Authorities in Migrant Deportations

Noise - The distraction pattern is false common enemy, in this case immigrants. This frequent pattern is described at length in an earlier tracker article.

14 articles - 40% high factuality - Ground News story.

18. Cost of DOGE cuts appear to wipe out most of agency’s reported ‘savings’

Noise - The distraction pattern is staff outrageous behavior. As this article reports:

Tech billionaire Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) task force was originally promised to find $2 trillion in savings to the taxpayers — a figure swiftly revised to $1 trillion, and then more recently to a far more modest $150 billion. The problem, wrote Zeeshan Aleem for MSNBC, is that we're now getting to savings so low they don't even offset the extra money DOGE is costing the government with its own blunders and dysfunction. [These additional costs add] up to around $145 billion in costs, pretty much what DOGE is promising to save in the first place.

Most stories about Musk and DOGE have been about Musk’s outrageous behavior. Now these stories are shifting to effects of this behavior. But the focus is still on noise like cost savings, rather than signal, such as Musk’s unilateral cancelation of spending authorized by Congress (which damages democracy) or cuts to the Social Security staff (which damages the economy). The latter is so damaging that the former head of the agency predicts “interruption of benefits” due to the DOGE cuts. (source)

11 articles - 88% high factuality - Ground News story.

19. Oil Prices Struggle as Oversupply and Trade Tensions Weigh on Market

Noise - The distraction pattern is Trump’s outrageous behavior. His high tariffs on most countries has triggered global economic damage, here in the form of falling oil prices due to curtailed demand. The story is not about damage to the US economy but the global economy, and is thus noise rather than signal.

23 articles - 89% high factuality - Ground News story.

20. Trump approves major disaster declaration for April flooding in Kentucky

Normal - Administration actions for disaster relief are normal news.

19 articles - 100% high factuality - Ground News story.

21. Trump's 100-Day Approval Rating at Historic Low, New Polls Reveal

SIGNAL1 - The poll reveals high concern with Trump’s impact on the US economy. From the story summary:

Donald Trump has reached the lowest approval rating of any U.S. President after 100 days in office, with only 39% approving of his performance according to a Washington Post-ABC News Ipsos poll.

Economic concerns significantly impacted approval ratings, with 72% believing Trump's policies may cause a recession and 73% stating the economy is in poor condition.

Voters reported dissatisfaction with Trump's handling of inflation and tariffs, with only 35% approving of his tariffs and 62% saying inflation is rising.

188 articles - 84% high factuality - Ground News story.

22. States were informed that federal funding may be affected if unemployment benefits are issued to individuals not legally authorized to receive them

Noise - The distraction pattern is false common enemy. The “individuals” are immigrants. This frequent pattern is described in an earlier tracker article.

22 articles - 11% high factuality - Ground News story.

23. Second Suspect Arrested in Theft of DHS Secretary Kristi Noem's Purse

Noise - The distraction pattern is the same as the above story: false common enemy.

Normally thefts like this are notable only because a famous person was involved. But right-wing sources have amplified trivial into newsworthy noise with headlines like “Illegal Migrant Arrested for Stealing Noem's Purse, Another Sought” (NewsMax) and “In Ironic Twist, Man Who Allegedly Stole Kristi Noem’s Bag Is Illegal Migrant, DHS Sec Says” (Daily Caller)

248 articles - 77% high factuality - Ground News story.

24. US could restrict Mexican livestock imports over screwworm worry, official says

Noise - The distraction pattern is false common enemy. US Republicans and Trump have vilified Mexico as a source of illegal migrants and drugs, making any story about Mexico’s border notable news.

52 articles - 60% high factuality - Ground News story.

25. Trump’s Tariffs Stoke Fears of Shortages

SIGNAL1 - This is all about damage to the US economy due to Trump’s actions.

15 articles - 100% high factuality - Ground News story.

26. Poll reveals mixed feelings on President Trump's first 100 days

SIGNAL1 - The inevitable has come to pass. Trump’s actions are beginning to have consequences with voters, as seen in the story summary:

As President Donald Trump nears 100 days into his second term, voters are focused on prices, tariffs, and immigration issues, according to a poll by the Center Square Voter's Voice. Concerns about inflation are top issues for 41% of voters, with tariffs and international trade at 33% and illegal immigration at 26%.

Concerns about inflation and tariffs are signal 1: Trump is destroying the American economy. Concern on democracy is small, so this is classified as signal 1.

105 articles - 90% high factuality - Ground News story.

27. A stunning reversal of fortunes in Canada's historic election

Noise - The distraction pattern is Trump’s outrageous behavior, specficially his threats to annex Canada and sudden large tarrifs on Canada. This caused support for the leading conservative candidate to drop 25 points compared to liberal Mark Carney, who is now expected to win the April 29 election.

5 articles - 67% high factuality - Ground News story.