When it comes to federal disaster aid requests, Donald Trump has politicized the process in genuinely scandalous ways, abandoning all subtlety in explicitly connecting relief funds to campaign endorsements. In fact, in the run-up to the midterm elections, the president was surprisingly candid about his abuses.

With less than a week remaining before Election Day, after approving aid in ways that appeared designed to help struggling Republican officials, Trump headlined a rally in Florida in which he boasted about approving relief funds he considered unnecessary — because he liked the conservative part of the state that made the request.

But to fully appreciate the scope of the underlying controversy, it’s also important to consider the data. The Associated Press reported in July, for example, on a data analysis that showed the White House consistently denied aid to Democratic-led states in disproportionate ways, which dovetailed with a Politico report from March that pointed to the administration’s own statistics and concluded that Trump had “rejected disaster aid for Democratic-run states at the highest rate in the 47-year history of the Federal Emergency Management Agency.”

This week, in the aftermath of the midterms, Team Trump announced that it’s time for a change. Will the administration finally start handling federal disaster aid in an apolitical way? No, but it will instead address the problem by obscuring some of the data that made the president look bad in the first place. Politico reported:

The Trump administration has stopped disclosing natural disaster data that has shown President Donald Trump favoring Republican states in awarding federal aid.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency last week removed from its daily operations briefing an official list of pending disaster requests that it has published since at least 2012.

The change happened one day after Politico published a related report on Trump fast-tracking aid to Florida just ahead of the midterms, while ignoring related requests from other states that had been pending longer. (Remember, the president himself publicly said last week that he didn’t think the money for Florida were necessary, though he approved it anyway and rushed it to the Sunshine State.)

Kenny Stancil, deputy research director at the Revolving Door Project, which monitors Trump’s handling of disaster aid, told Politico, “This is a very troubling development that’s consistent with the Trump Administration’s broader war on data.” Stancil added that concealing disaster requests “could make it easier for the Trump Administration to get away with unequal treatment of disaster victims based on the state they live in.”

By all appearances, that is almost certainly the point.

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