President Donald J. Trump’s firing of the commissioner of labor statistics on Friday for announcing that job growth has slowed dramatically has drawn a level of attention to Trump’s assault on democracy that other firings have not. Famously, authoritarian governments make up statistics to claim their policies are working well, even when they quite obviously are not.
Yesterday former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers told George Stephanopoulos of This Week on ABC News: “This is the stuff of democracies giving way to authoritarianism…. [F]iring statisticians goes with threatening the heads of newspapers. It goes with launching assaults on universities. It goes with launching assaults on law firms that defend clients that the elected boss finds uncongenial. This is really scary stuff." In The Bulwark, Bill Kristol called out the open assault “on the truth, on the rule of law, on a free society” as “part of the broader pattern of the transformation of government information into pure propaganda.”
Summers shot down Trump’s claim that the commissioner had rigged the numbers in the jobs report to make him look bad. "These numbers are put together by teams of literally hundreds of people following detailed procedures that are in manuals,” he said. “There's no conceivable way that the head of the [Bureau of Labor Statistics] could have manipulated this number.”
Kathryn Anne Edwards at Bloomberg explained the implications of Trump’s determination to control economic statistics: “The peril…isn’t a potential recession; it’s losing highly reliable, accurate and transparent data on the health of the world’s largest economy.” As Ben Casselman pointed out in the New York Times, officials at the Federal Reserve, for example, need reliable statistics on inflation and unemployment to inform decisions about interest rates, which in turn affect how much Americans pay for car loans and mortgages.
Economist Paul Krugman noted that Trump lashed out against the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics because most economists warned that Trump’s economic policies would hurt the economy, and the official data is starting to confirm that he was wrong and they were right. Krugman suggested that those numbers will continue to get worse as Trump’s tariffs and deportations start to show up in inflation.
An Associated Press/ NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll released today shows that 86% of American adults report that the cost of groceries is a source of stress, with 53% saying it causes “major” stress. Only 14% of adults say the cost of groceries is not a source of stress for them.
On all his key issues Trump is currently underwater—meaning that more people disapprove of his handling of them than approve—and reports that he is abandoning his campaign promise to require healthcare insurance companies to pay for in vitro fertilization, or IVF, will not endear him to those voters, either. Krugman notes that as Trump’s popularity is disintegrating, he appears to be ramping up his attempts to destroy American democracy.
At the same time, the administration continues to reel under pressure over the files related to the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Trump’s inability to let the issue drop is keeping it very much alive. On Sunday the president railed against radio host Charlamagne Tha God for saying that the administration’s poor handling of the Epstein issue created an opportunity for traditional Republicans to take their party back.
As more information emerges about Trump’s association with Epstein, Trump and his loyalists are trying hard to push stories suggesting that former secretary of state Hillary Clinton or former president Barack Obama or other Democrats are the real criminals.
On July 24, director of national intelligence Tulsi Gabbard claimed that officials in the administration of Barack Obama ”manufactured” evidence in 2016 to suggest that Trump’s campaign was connected to Russian operatives. This was ridiculous on its face, but then the administration declassified documents it claimed proved their allegations. But another set of documents released on August 1 said the two emails that purportedly proved such a plan were instead, as Charlie Savage of the New York Times put it, “most likely manufactured by Russian spies.”
After Gabbard made her claims, media outlets reported that Attorney General Pam Bondi was surprised as well as annoyed by Gabbard’s explosive accusations and, already in trouble for botching the Epstein issue, scrambled to support them.
Today Sadie Gurman, Josh Dawsey, and Brett Forrest of the Wall Street Journal reported that, according to an official at the Department of Justice, Bondi has signed an order directing a U.S. attorney to present evidence concerning the matter to a grand jury. This is a major escalation in their crusade to convince voters that the real story in the news should be that Trump is a victim.
The Wall Street Journal reporters note that the administration’s claims “come as the Trump administration has faced intense bipartisan criticism over its refusal to provide more information about the FBI investigation into convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.”
Another aspect of the Epstein issue is also in the news today. After the Wall Street Journal published the story by Khadeeja Safdar and Joe Palazzolo reporting that Trump contributed a bawdy birthday letter to an album Epstein’s associate Ghislaine Maxwell compiled for Epstein’s fiftieth birthday in 2003, Trump sued the Wall Street Journal’s parent company Dow Jones and owner Rupert Murdoch for $10 billion. But the lawsuit read as if it were written primarily to rile up Trump’s base. The Wall Street Journal stood firm on the accuracy of its reporting, and the defendants moved to dismiss the lawsuit.
Then Trump asked a federal judge in Miami to force Murdoch to answer questions under oath within 15 days, and that, too, sounded like an attempt to display dominance. The request stressed Murdoch’s age and ill health as a reason for the request. "Murdoch is 94 years old, has suffered from multiple health issues throughout his life, is believed to have suffered recent significant health scares, and is presumed to live in New York, New York," all making him unlikely to be able to testify at a trial, the filing read.
Today Trump quietly backed away from his demand for Murdoch’s deposition, and both sides put off discovery—the process of disclosing information and evidence to the other party—at least until after the motion to dismiss has been decided.
Trump’s former lawyer Todd Blanche, now deputy attorney general at the Department of Justice, has met twice with Maxwell, who says she will “testify openly and honestly” before Congress about Epstein if she gets a pardon. She is currently serving a twenty-year sentence for sex trafficking and other charges. Today Alexander Bolton of The Hill said Republican senators are warning Trump and Bondi that they should consider very carefully whether it would be a good idea to grant Maxwell a pardon.
Also today, Casey Gannon of CNN reported that two of Epstein’s victims have filed letters with the court expressing outrage at the Justice Department’s handling of the Epstein files, suggesting that the department was protecting wealthy men at the expense of the victims.
Of all the terrible things Donald Trump has said and done as president, the most dangerous one just happened on Friday. Trump, in effect, ordered our trusted and independent government office of economic statistics to become as big a liar as he is.
He fired Erika McEntarfer, the Senate-confirmed head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, for bringing him economic news he did not like, and in the hours immediately following, the second most dangerous thing happened: The senior Trump officials most responsible for running our economy — people who in their private businesses never would have contemplated firing a subordinate who brought them financial data they did not like — all went along for the ride.
What they should have said to Trump is this: “Mr. President, if you don’t reconsider this decision — if you fire the top labor bureau statistician because she brought you bad economic news — how will anyone in the future trust that office when it issues good news?” Instead, they immediately covered for him.
As The Wall Street Journal pointed out, Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer had actually gone on Bloomberg TV early Friday and declared that even though the jobs report that had just been released was revised downward for May and June, “we’ve seen positive job growth.” But as soon as she got the news hours later that Trump had fired the very B.L.S. director who reports to her, she wrote on X: “I agree wholeheartedly with @POTUS that our jobs numbers must be fair, accurate, and never manipulated for political purposes.”
As The Journal asked: “So were the jobs data that were ‘positive’ in the morning rigged by the afternoon?” Of course not.
The moment I heard what Trump had done, I had a flashback. It was January 2021, and it had just been reported that Trump, after losing the 2020 election, had tried to pressure Georgia’s Republican secretary of state to “find” him enough votes — exactly 11,780, Trump said — to overturn the presidential election and even threatened him with “a criminal offense” if he didn’t. The pressure came during an hourlong telephone call, according to an audio recording of the conversation.
The difference, though, is that back then there was something called a Republican official with integrity. And so Georgia’s secretary of state did not agree to fabricate votes that did not exist. But that species of Republican official seems to have gone completely extinct in Trump’s second term. So Trump’s rotten character is now a problem for our whole economy.
Going forward, how many government bureaucrats are going to dare to pass along bad news when they know that their bosses — people like Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, the director of the National Economic Council, Kevin Hassett, the Labor Secretary Chavez-DeRemer and the U.S. trade representative Jamieson Greer — will not only fail to defend them but will actually offer them up as a sacrifice to Trump to keep their jobs?
Shame on each and every one of them — particularly on Bessent, a former hedge fund manager, who knows better and did not step in. What a coward. As Bessent’s predecessor, Janet Yellen, the former Treasury secretary and also the former chair of the Federal Reserve — and a person with actual integrity — told my Times colleague Ben Casselman of the B.L.S. firing: “This is the kind of thing you would only expect to see in a banana republic.”
It is important to know how foreigners are looking at this. Bill Blain, a London-based bond trader who publishes a newsletter popular among market experts called Blain’s Morning Porridge, wrote on Monday: “Friday, Aug. 1 might go down in history as the day the U.S. Treasury market died. There was an art to reading U.S. data. It relied on trust. Now that is broken — if you can’t trust the data, what can you trust?”
He then went on to imagine how his Porridge newsletter will sound in May 2031. It will begin, he wrote, with “a link to a release from Trump’s Ministry of Economic Truth, formerly the U.S. Treasury: ‘Under the leadership of President Trump, the U.S. economy continues to grow at record speed. Payrolls data from the Ministry of Truth, a subsidiary of Truth Social, show full employment across America. Tensions in the inner cities have never been so low. All recent graduates have found highly paid jobs across America’s expanding manufacturing sector, causing many large companies in Trump Inc to report significant labor shortages.’”
If you think this is far-fetched, you clearly have not been following the foreign policy news, because this kind of tactic — the tailoring of information to fit Trump’s political needs — has already been deployed in the intelligence field.
In May the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, fired two top intelligence officials who oversaw an assessment that contradicted Trump’s assertions that the gang Tren de Aragua was operating under the direction of the Venezuelan regime. Their assessment undermined the dubious legal rationale Trump invoked — the rarely used 1798 Alien Enemies Act — to allow the suspected gang members to be thrown out of the country without due process.
And now this trend toward self-blinding is spreading to further corners of the government.
One of America’s premier cyberwarriors, Jen Easterly, who was the director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency during the Biden administration, had her appointment to a senior teaching position at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point revoked last week by Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll after Laura Loomer, a far-right conspiracy theorist, posted that Easterly was a Biden-era mole.
Read that sentence again very slowly. The Army secretary, acting on the guidance of a loony Trump acolyte, revoked the teaching appointment of — anyone will tell you — one of America’s most skilled nonpartisan cyberwarriors, herself a graduate of West Point.
And when you are done reading that, read Easterly’s response on LinkedIn: “As a lifelong independent, I’ve served our nation in peacetime and combat under Republican and Democratic administrations. I’ve led missions at home and abroad to protect all Americans from vicious terrorists …. I’ve worked my entire career not as a partisan, but as a patriot — not in pursuit of power, but in service to the country I love and in loyalty to the Constitution I swore to protect and defend, against all enemies.”
And then she added this advice to the young West Pointers she will not have the honor of teaching: “Every member of the Long Gray Line knows the Cadet Prayer. It asks that we ‘choose the harder right instead of the easier wrong.’ That line — so simple, yet so powerful — has been my North Star for more than three decades. In boardrooms and war rooms. In quiet moments of doubt and in public acts of leadership. The harder right is never easy. That’s the whole point.”
That is the woman Trump did not want teaching our next generation of fighters.
And that ethic — always choose the harder right instead of the easier wrong — is the ethic that Bessent, Hassett, Chavez-DeRemer and Greer know nothing of — not to mention Trump himself.
That is why, dear reader, though I am a congenital optimist, for the first time I believe that if the behavior that this administration has exhibited in just its first six months continues and is amplified for its full four years, the America you know will be gone. And I don’t know how we will get it back.
The America We Knew Is Rapidly Slipping Away
I always suspected that the best characteristics of the USA were on a somewhat shaky footing. And I've thought that, ever since he began his political career, Donald Trump and his brand of racist, sexist, grievance-based populism was a threat to our democracy's fragile foundations. But I didn't expect to see this much destruction accomplished so easily in six months. Consider the Texas redistricting horror show – note the threat by Newsom and other Democratic governors to redistrict their states in response. In a way I don't blame them – but it's a case of two wrongs not making a right. It's just as anti-democratic as what Abbot's doing. I wonder how far this vengeful game of tit-for-tat will go on and how much more damage it will do.
