Donald Trump has, since he first returned to the White House in January, been on a steady march towards authoritarianism, and took another big leap in that direction last Friday when he fired Bureau of Labor Statistics Commissioner Erika McEntarfer, a nonpartisan career expert and economics Ph.D., after her agency produced a softer jobs report than he wanted to see, claiming against all evidence and the truth that she had somehow manipulated the results.
It was a total lie, another whopper from the president. The BLS data isn’t rigged or fake or politicized. It is the best available survey of the U.S. jobs market. The numbers go up and they go down not on the whims of the commissioner and the dedicated civil service employees, but according to the employment levels in the national economy.
But the problem now, due to Trump’s false accusations, is that some may not trust the validity of the data and that the people who produce the stats may be fearful of reporting accurate info if it will displease Trump.
That McEntarfer was nominated by Joe Biden last year to the four year term and confirmed overwhelmingly 86-8 by the bipartisan Senate didn’t matter to Trump either. He wanted someone to blame, just like the Trump administration has expanded its political targeting of people and institutions that are not perceived to be adequately toeing the ideological line.
Its weaponization of the Justice Department and expansion of a massive and often unaccountable immigration enforcement apparatus gives it a significant ability to target enemies. The same for the press and universities and law firms that Trump doesn’t agree with. They get targeted by his government.
Trump wants to control the flow of information, not just ideological discourse but even the basic reality that its citizens inhabit, from unemployment rates to educational figures to the value of its own currency. This type of information is, after all, the basic prism through which we actually understand the world around us, and which enables both the citizenry and political opposition to point out when things are going wrong and present alternative visions for the future.
To attempt to exert control over these things is to indicate quite clearly that the population is not entitled to reality. Reality is what the leader says, quite simply, so stop complaining and follow the party line.
We have become so used to a government where the civil bureaucracy has been committed to producing and presenting accurate information for so long that it’s hard for us to even envision what it would look like otherwise. In that way, Americans have been spoiled; we’ve come to take it as a given that individuals, investors, researchers and businesses will be able to look up government data and at the very least trust that it was gathered by experts with a mandate to represent things as accurately as they possibly could.
This is unfortunately not a given nor a law of nature; it is a practice that must be actively maintained, which has been one of the key things that has set the United States apart as a nation.
Predictably, Trump’s sycophants have fallen in line since he fired McEntarfer, but this erosion of trust will hurt everyone, even the Trump supporter. A government data environment that is now reactive to political considerations is not merely going to own the libs or whatever else the MAGA movement intends it to do.
Rather, the degrading of the labor stats will hamstring the ability of private industry to make long-term plans, hamper foreign investment, shake the dollar’s stability and prevent the government from effectively responding to circumstances ranging from public health emergencies to inflation. We’ll all pay the price.