Trump Is Desperately Trying to Rig Economic Data In His Favor
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 BLMS 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 own 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 lambast 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.