Donald Trump’s firing the messenger over unwanted jobs numbers is just the latest attempt to squash measurements of accountability across his government that another column just this week addressed.
Angered over the optics of downward monthly job numbers for June and a significant recalculation of the previous two months, Trump fired Erika McEntarfer, the labor bureau commissioner, whose job it was to reach out to companies in a systematic way to record hiring trends. Not only are she and her bureau “independent,” the whole idea of collecting information is to guide decision-making by the government.
But, as he repeatedly shows us, Trump starts with the presumed outcome of his policies, and then impatiently expects his will to become fact. His vision of governing is what the rest of us see as the epitome of autocracy: Trump speaks, all of us fall in line immediately.
Among others, The New York Times, went further, to see a president who responds with impatient, disproportionate, and volatile actions. Trump lashes out with imprudent presidential response when he does not get his way — whether in data reports, confrontations with perceived foes, law firms, universities, political figures who criticize him. The newspaper noted Trump’s immediate decision to reposition two nuclear-powered submarines nearer to Russia after critical remarks to him from Russian former president Dmitri Medvedev, his campaign against Fed chair Jerome Powell over interest rates, his targeting of Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, among many other examples.
Mediate.com said the firing was “a despotic red flag”; the Fox News site reworks the figures to show slight job gains among U.S. citizens without focus on the dismissal at the Labor Department.
It’s a pattern that goes back to wishing Covid away rather than dealing with a growing emergency or just declaring that Iran’s nuclear weapons development was obliterated by a single bomb strike.
In other words, Trump is doing what he can to ensure that impatient immediacy for control of the public’s understanding is not just a personality quirk, it is central to his presidency.
It’s Not Just Data
So, we see the Smithsonian editing a display about presidential impeachments to remove mention of Trump’s double-entry as an impeached president, university presidents making deals that cost them hundreds of millions that will have to be passed on as student tuition or alumni fund-raising to lift Trump threats about research money, tariffs used as a political weapon against Canadian foreign policy stances and more. It has become standard to see international leaders publicly forced to praise Trump just to get into a substantive conversation with him.
Earlier this week, Trump publicly acknowledged starvation conditions in Gaza, but he did so based on television news images rather than on reports from his own vast intelligence network. He reset tariff rates nation-by-nation based on arbitrary math that seemed only to reflect whether countries had bowed to his demands.
As president, he seems to spend as much time on sending rattling social media posts about the need to comply with his wishes as he does on anything that we would recognize as the intended work of the White House.
The firing of at the Bureau of Labor Statistics is both part of a pattern and a danger signal.
If Trump — as he says — puts in place loyalists who will only report out good economic news as valid statistics, it will fuel far more than his ego. Those numbers and any number of other economic reports behind the published monthly numbers are what show the practical effects of policy for the Fed, banks, investors, manufacturers, as well as workers and consumers.
Oddly, were the jobless numbers a bit worse, they might spur the Fed to do exactly what Trump really wants — a move to lower interest rates. The Fed is balancing unemployment, which basically remained unchanged this month, against the prospects of inflation. Still, the public perception from this week’s announcements was that Trump’s tariffs policies are responsible for the uncertainty that prompts employers to hold back on new hires.
The result is a report that makes Trump look less than successful, and he lashed out.
Avoiding reality doesn’t work with raising kids, successful marriages. relations with co-workers or running a business. Why should it work for a president to ignore information that reflects complexities in health, environment, race and identity issues, immigration or national security?
Feeding the Trump ego with bogus information does no good for him or for the country. What makes for good leadership is the opposite — the ability to take information in, devise with counsel a workable path ahead and to execute it while keeping people informed.
It puts the burden for tracking what Trump’s policies do on all of us.
