https://newrepublic.com/article/198743/trump-desperately-trying-rig-economic-data-favor

Trump Is Desperately Trying to Rig Economic Data in His Favor

The firing of the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics is the latest front in the president’s war on objective reality.

On Friday, Donald Trump fired Erika McEntarfer, the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, for the crime of doing her job. Earlier that day, the BLS had released new jobs numbers that showed anemic growth in July—just 73,000 jobs were added—and revised numbers for May and June that showed decreases in total jobs for those months. Overall, the picture was bleak: Just 106,000 jobs added over three months. The president, unsurprisingly, was furious, and as such, immediately began alleging an elaborate and nonsensical conspiracy to undermine his administration. “Important numbers like this must be fair and accurate, they can’t be manipulated for political purposes,” Trump wrote on his bespoke social network Truth Social.

McEntarfer wasn’t the only federal employee in his sights; he also took the opportunity to lambaste Fed Chair Jerome Powell, who has long been a target of his ire. “The Economy is BOOMING under TRUMP,” he wrote in a wild run-on sentence with a variety of punctuation, “despite a Fed that also plays games, this time with Interest Rates, where they lowered them twice, and substantially, just before the Presidential Election, I assume in the hopes of getting ‘Kamala’ elected—How did that work out? Jerome ‘Too Late’ Powell should also be put ‘out to pasture.” (Powell was appointed by Trump in 2018.)

Trump is right, obviously, to be upset about the jobs numbers. They’re really bad—the worst numbers since the height of the Covid pandemic. Before that, the last time there were jobs numbers this bad was during the Great Recession. But Trump, although he will never admit it, has no one to blame for the state of the economy but himself. His decision to fire McEntarfer—and, as a result, cast doubt on the reliability of all future data, not just from the Bureau of Labor Statistics but from any economic agency—will only make things worse.


"They’re really bad—the worst numbers since the height of the Covid pandemic. Before that, the last time there were jobs numbers this bad was during the Great Recession" 😂