Does the Trump Administration’s Gaslighting Feel Familiar?
What we are watching right now with the Trump administration’s gaslighting-on-steroids response to the horrific killing of a Minneapolis woman by federal ICE agents is a deliberate effort to control the narrative in the face of obvious culpability.
Not even a pause to investigate what happened. Instead, officials rushed to manufacture a story that reduces institutional exposure and deflects accountability. This is a deliberate strategy. Institutions with power do this when the truth is inconvenient or threatening.
If this sounds familiar, it is because the same thing happens at workplaces every day.
Of course, the current federal shit-show is far more serious than what most people experience at work. But the mechanism is identical. When institutions face risk, they don’t just deny responsibility. They rewrite reality, they lie.
They manufacture a story that serves the institution, not the truth. They manipulate language, alter timelines, and invent context to retroactively justify what cannot be justified. The objective is disorientation and confusion.
You become the problem, not what was done to you. You are labeled emotional (especially women!), biased, unstable, or incapable of seeing the bigger picture. Your credibility is attacked, while the institution presents itself as calm, rational, and responsible. None of this is about truth. It is about containment and control.
Over time, this has a predictable effect. You begin to doubt your own memory or fear you’re “overreacting”. You replay conversations over and over again. You wonder whether you misunderstood something that felt crystal clear when it happened. That self-doubt is normal, the result of being trapped inside a system that controls the story.
I see this pattern constantly in my work with employees navigating toxic workplaces. Different setting. Same playbook. It’s the system.
If you are dealing with this at work and feel like you are losing your footing, I help employees regain their sanity, their voice, and their leverage.