When authoritarianism encroaches, apologists often present a strongman’s power grabs as rational — even imperative for the national good.
Top Trump administration aides followed that playbook on Sunday, justifying the president’s abrupt firing of the government’s top labor official in charge of employment statistics over jobs numbers that dented his proclamation of a new “golden age.”
But the ouster of Bureau of Labor Statistics Commissioner Erika McEntarfer, taken alongside President Donald Trump’s concurrent bid to destroy the independence of the Federal Reserve, threatens the US economy’s reputation as a bulwark of stability and integrity that has undergirded generations of prosperity.
Such political interference might bolster Trump’s ever-growing power. But it could backfire by eroding the trust of investors, companies and organizations that depend on accurate and truthful statistics on the economy’s health to make major decisions that can impact the lives of millions of people. Even the Federal Reserve uses it to decide on monetary policy.
And when countries don’t firewall official data, they risk ending up like Argentina or Greece, where the invention of rosy statistics masked economic malaise and sparked financial crises. Or China, where fantastical official figures designed to bolster the regime’s credibility fostered corruption — and benefited the US by comparison.
Trump’s assault on the BLS is also more than a narrow economic question. It’s the latest erratic move by a president who believes he has total power and is immune from consequences, and who has become increasingly hubristic following a string of political wins this summer.
Trump’s domination of Congress and testing of constitutional limits have compromised constraints on presidential authority in a nation founded on the rejection of punitive and impetuous economic decisions by an all-powerful ruler.
His quest for omnipotence across society can also be seen in his successful attempts to impose his ideology on top universities, his coercion of big-time law firms and his attacks on the media. Mirroring his assault on economic data, Trump and his aides have launched a purge of government scientists and experts whose findings conflict with the MAGA movement’s doctrine on climate and vaccines. And while Republican presidents have sometimes had a point in arguing that their goals can be thwarted by a bureaucracy that they regard as overly liberal, Trump’s assault on the federal government that he leads has funneled ever more unaccountable power into the Oval Office.
Trump’s authoritarian response to weak job numbers could cause him more trouble
But the president is taking a big economic risk.
In the short term, his attack on the credibility of government data may exacerbate the economic uncertainty already gathering around the White House and darkening GOP prospects in next year’s midterm elections.
“BLS is the finest statistical agency in the entire world. Its numbers are trusted all over the world,” former Commissioner for the Bureau of Labor Statistics William Beach told Kasie Hunt on CNN’s “State of the Union.” “I do believe, though, that the president’s attack on the commissioner and on the bureau is undermining that infrastructure, could undermine that trust over the long term.”
Senior Trump aides went onto Sunday shows to make a case for his volatile reaction to the jobs numbers that subverted his own version of reality.
“The president wants his own people there so that when we see the numbers, they’re more transparent and more reliable,” Kevin Hassett, the director of the White House Economic Council, said Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
Job seekers attend a job fair hosted by the Cook County government to support federal workers in Chicago on June 26. – Jamie Kelter Davis/Bloomberg/Getty Images
Another top Trump official, US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer, argued that “you want to be able to have somewhat reliable numbers.” He said on CBS’ “Face the Nation” that “there are always revisions, but sometimes, you see these revisions go in really extreme ways. … The president is the president. He can choose who works in the executive branch.”
Trump was irked by job data that showed the economy created only 73,000 jobs in July. The monthly totals for May and June were also revised downward by a combined 258,000 jobs. Such recalculations are integral to the bureau’s task of presenting an accurate picture of the economy over the longer term, and not just month to month. In this case, the jobs numbers appeared to confirm other indicators that contradict Trump’s claims the economy is roaring, amid data showing slowing growth and a rise in inflation last month.
One big danger now is that Trump’s economic fabulism will gather its own momentum and infect confidence in government statistics that will long outlive his presidency. Employment data is published as part of a multilayered process that would be almost impossible for one official to corrupt. But if Trump appoints a politicized official to head the BLS with an incentive to please him, the pressure on officials to produce corrupted data would be intense. If jobs numbers are worse next month, will he fire someone else? And if the numbers improve, will anyone believe in their integrity?
“Suppose that they get a new commissioner, and this person, male or female, are just the best people possible, right? And they do a bad number. Well, everybody’s going to think, ‘Well, it’s not as bad as it probably really is,’ because they’re going to suspect political influence,” Beach said on “State of the Union.”
Trump has long tried to change reality
The president’s turn against his own government’s nonpartisan number-crunchers when they produced a report that he didn’t like was rather predictable.
In 2018, he coaxed supporters from the real world into his illusory political environment, saying, “Just remember, what you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.”
This mantra was borne out during his first term.
In his first hours in office, Trump furiously ignited a controversy over the size of the crowd at his inauguration, which he claimed, despite photographic evidence, was the biggest ever. At the time, this seemed an absurd sideshow. But it turned out to set the stage for an entire presidency of fabricating facts.
His attempt now to invent jobs numbers that fit with his version of reality recalls his negligent handling of the Covid-19 pandemic. Trump frequently claimed that if the US stopped testing for the virus, it would simply have no more cases.
And Trump’s claim that Friday’s jobs numbers were “rigged” recalls his greatest-ever attack on truth: his false claims that the 2020 election was stolen. When voters produced a result that he didn’t like, he attempted to destroy the credibility of the system that produced it and to fix the outcome.
Trump is acting without restraint. What does this mean?
Memories of 2020 are especially sobering in the light of Friday’s developments because of the way Trump’s personal embarrassments often lead him to pursue authoritarian outcomes.
Often, Trump’s critics have proclaimed that authoritarianism is on the march whatever he does. There’s an entire political and media industrial complex devoted to the idea that Americans are already living under a dictatorship.
There’s no comparison to the one-party police state endured by citizens of China. The dynastic tyranny of North Korea has no echoes in the United States, and this country is far short of the psychological torture suffered by the people of Myanmar, who live under a pervasive, repressive state. But Trump’s actions are adding to growing evidence that he is engineering a degradation of democratic and pluralistic institutions. Comparisons between the president and populist authoritarian strongmen leaders such as Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán or Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan look increasingly apt.
The new controversy over jobs numbers comes at a moment when the second Trump administration is acting almost without restraint.
Trump single-handedly remade the global trading system by imposing tariffs, apparently according to his whims, while completely bypassing a genuflecting GOP Congress that has done nothing to defend its constitutional authority to dictate policy in that area.
Containers are handled at the a terminal in the port of Hamburg in Germany on July 28. – Christian Charisius/picture alliance/Getty Images
His transformation of the intelligence services into a vessel for his political convenience has led to false claims and probes accusing President Barack Obama’s administration of treason over Russian election meddling in 2016.
Trump’s weaponization of the Justice Department is creating immense suspicion after Ghislaine Maxwell was moved to a more lenient prison after two days of talks with Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche. Trump is struggling to end a political crisis over his ties to her late associate Jeffrey Epstein, an accused sex trafficker and convicted sex offender.
And on Sunday, Trump’s demands for a rewriting of congressional districts in Texas to make it easier for Republicans to cling onto the House next year precipitated a political crisis that is now having national implications.
Trump’s second term has often seemed like an attempt to recast the world as he’d prefer it to be. He’s pardoned or released criminals convicted in connection with the Capitol riot on January 6, 2021. The Pentagon has removed photos of top brass who contradicted him from its walls. And Trump has repeatedly attacked judges and claimed their actions are illegal as part of a pattern of behavior that CNN’s Aaron Blake has justifiably called Orwellian.
An apparent sense that there’s no restraint on his power now seems to be feeding into Trump’s foreign policy.
Angered by Russia’s failure to sign up to his Ukraine peace plan, Trump last week reacted to threats by former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev by saying he’d repositioned US nuclear submarines.
Medvedev is now mostly known as an online troll and has only a minor position in Russian politics, so it’s hard to understand why Trump was so easily goaded. And Trump’s reaction ignored the fact that submarines that prowl the oceans in silence, carrying the second tier of the US nuclear deterrent, are constantly in position to fire off their missiles. But the spectacle of an American president indulging in nuclear saber-rattling, just before this week’s 80th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, was chilling.
Meanwhile, Trump had a volcanic reaction following a rare show of dissent from Capitol Hill when Democrats, using their minority privileges in the Senate, blocked an attempt to ram through his conservative judicial nominees before the summer recess. Trump told Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer of New York to “GO TO HELL!” after the collapse of a deal to swap some nominee confirmations for the restoration of some government funding cuts.
Such an extreme reaction to a rather routine example of congressional gridlock only underscores how Trump has become used to getting his way.
And he’s determined that no one will stop him.
For more CNN news and newsletters create an account at CNN.com
