Let's Fix This Country

A.I.’s Believers Don’t Want to Know About Trouble Ahead

< technology|290||Is A.I. hallucinating about its future?>

Artificial intelligence promises to diagnose baffling illnesses, design new drugs, solve mathematical conundra, and unravel a long list of puzzlements that have proven difficult for humans to fathom.

The savants of Silicon Valley take these promises a good deal further. They speak of bringing humanity into a new age of enlightenment, seeming to revel in their god-like intentions to create a superintelligence destined to make humans obsolete. article illustration
Formerly a cornfield, Amazon’s data center for A.I. at New Carlisle, Indiana.

not hiringSam Altman, the most prominent voice of the A.I. universe and CEO of OpenAI, the company that created ChatGPT, has written that a next step, artificial general intelligence, or A.G.I., will usher in “massive prosperity”.

But Altman also writes that the superintelligence that “humanity is close to building” will lead to “whole classes of jobs going away”. Silicon Valley barges ahead nonetheless, making A.I. ever more powerful, unconcerned that their endeavors are likely to put millions out of work.

A.I. is already killing the entry-level job. “The unemployment rate for degree holders ages 22 to 27 hit 5.8% this spring”, reports Bloomberg Businessweek. For computer engineering majors, the unemployment rate is now 7.5%. Companies are “going to need less and less people at the bottom”, said one CEO, a grim outlook for new college graduates. One said, possibly not kidding, it’s harder “to land an entry-level role at one of the big banks than it is to get into Harvard University”. One tech company completely stopped hiring any engineers below a mid-level position “because lower-level tasks could now be done by A.I.” Newly graduated economists, normally enjoying 100% job prospects, are now having trouble finding positions as A.I. affects the market for even high-skilled workers.

Top executives at companies such as Amazon and JPMorgan say they plan to shrink their workforces considerably. CEO Andy Jassy sent shivers throughout Amazon with the comment that A.I. “will eliminate the need for certain jobs” as the company scrutinizes “revenue per employee” while examining what A.I. can do faster and cheaper than humans. Ford CEO Jim Farley said he expects A.I. will replace half of the white-collar workforce in the U.S.

Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan quotes another writer, John Ellis:

“I drive up and down ‘Old Post Road’ in Fairfield County (CT) almost every day. When I do, I pass office buildings and storefronts that are the workplaces of insurance brokers, local and regional bankers, mortgage brokers, lawyers, accountants, consultants, marketers, real estate agents, etc. And what I think about all those people as I pass them by is this: The companies they work for will employ 10%-25% fewer of them in (probably) two years, maybe three.”

What those people do for a living will be done by A.I. Noonan gets it right:

We natter on about what cable news natters on about: Is JD Vance next, can Gavin Newsom make the sale? But the biggest domestic political story of our time is happening now, a remaking of the employment field in America. Mr. Newsom doesn’t threaten Mr. Trump, A.I. does.”

But no fear! In their thrall of technology, tech titans such as Musk and Altman say that A.I. will, through cost savings and greater revenue, create such wealth that the evaporation of jobs will be replaced by a universal basic income, or maybe, Altman said on Theo Von’s podcast, that everyone will be given “an ownership share in whatever the A.I. creates”, an idea that he calls “universal extreme wealth”. It translates as, our future economic security will depend on the benevolence of Silicon Valley’s billionaires.

the sprawl of data centers

A GPU is a computer card or chip about three inches square that produces graphic displays on computers. Designed chiefly for video games, they proved ideal for A.I. when wired together in masses of thousands of chips. This, and the software running through them, is what makes a data center, as well as makes chipmaker Nvidia the U.S.’s largest company in market value at over $4 trillion.

There are already more than 5,000 data centers in the U.S., largely housing the internet, cloud computing, streaming, and so on. A.I. is in the process of exploding their size with hundreds of billions of dollars pouring into the building frenzy:

 In Indiana, Amazon will build 30 data centers on 1,200 acres of farmland. Its biggest customer will be Anthropic, a start-up in which Amazon invested $8 billion, which aims to develop an A.I. system that matches the capabilities of the human brain.

 Meta (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp) is building a 2-gigawatt data center in Louisiana.

 OpenAI is erecting a 1.2-gigawatt facility in Texas and another, nearly as large, in the United Arab Emirates.

 Elon Musk’s xAI data center in Memphis, dubbed “Colossus”, was built in 122 days of three eight-hour shifts and harnesses an array of 100,000 chips, which he plans to double. They skipped the time cost of planning and dealt with problems as they arose, says the builder.

down the drain

The U.S. has a history of squandering an irreplaceable asset, its groundwater. Areas around the country are facing serious shortages. With A.I. we’ve come up with yet another industry that consumes vast quantities of a resource on which the future of the country depends.

The Amazon facilities in Indiana, for example, will each year use millions of gallons of water to prevent chips from overheating. Globally, researchers at the University of California Riverside and the University of Texas Arlington tell us that by 2027 A.I. water usage will equal the total amount of water withdrawn by the entire country of Denmark. Or half that of the U.K.

Data centers typically help themselves to a municipal water supply, at least until there’s an uproar over diverting drinking water to industrial use, or when pressure drops to a trickle, or the funny taste reveals contaminants, or the water table is in danger of running dry. The taps went dry for people living near Meta’s $750 million data center in Georgia. Sediment caused one family to replace ruined appliances more than once. The county is on track for a water deficit by 2030. All was foreseeable but Meta probably figured the plant would be obsolete by 2030 and would leave Newton County to cope with the problem.

This comes about when tech companies identify a desirable area, swoop in with enticements to the local officials who are made along with construction workers to sign non-disclosure agreements. By the time residents learn what is happening, it’s too late.

power gluttons

Faced with the crucial need to modernize the nation’s grid for the sake of national security, to bring wind and solar power in from distance, to strengthen against cyber attacks, the power industry is diverted to this new demand of spending to accommodate commercial companies.

That expansion is because a ChatGPT query consumes 10-times the electricity of a Google search. Which explains why the five data centers OpenAI plans will collectively draw as much electricity as the three million homes of Massachusetts.article illustration
The innards of a data center..

OpenAI and Meta, operating on their large language models GPT-4 and Llama 3.1, use around 30 megawatts of electricity at a time, according to the nonprofit research group Epoch AI. That’s roughly as much power as 30 Walmart stores use at any given moment. That Amazon sprawl in Indiana is projected to consume at a level of 2.2 gigawatts — enough to power a million homes.

Analysts’ projections vary, but there are forecasts that data center electricity consumption will rise by 2030 to as much as 17% of all the electricity produced by the United States. Globally, McKinsey & Company projects that to support A.I. at its current rate of expansion, the world by 2030 will need to add around two to six times the energy capacity it took to power the entire state of California in 2022.

who pays?

Remarkably, the A.I. companies simply expect the power industry to meet its demands in whatever state they choose to set up their enormous power-guzzling centers. As public utilities, electric companies may be required to come up with a customer’s request, but who bears the costs of transmission lines, equipment, and even new power plants? This is especially true when A.I. companies choose states which have few or no data centers and will need to make costly upgrades to meet the demand. Wood MacKenzie, an energy research firm, analyzed 20 large power users and concluded that what they would pay to power companies would not be enough to cover their costs of expansion. Only Ohio, as far as we know, has demanded that A.I. companies pay more of the costs of meeting power demands that in that state will exceed 50-times the usage of existing data centers.

To cover the cost of this unbridled industry, utilities will need to seek approval of higher rates, and that means all their customers will find themselves paying heftier monthly electricity bills, subsidizing the noisy and unwanted data centers and the few jobs they provide once construction is done. U.S. power companies are already charging more to cover a surge in spending to upgrade the aging grid, harden facilities against extreme weather, power electric vehicles, and now comes the voracious appetite of data centers.

emission surge

How can the grid handle this without more power plants? Wind and solar have produced almost all of the increase in the nation’s power supply over the last decade, and A.I. data centers that run non-stop article illustration
Gas turbines can be as big as a large plane and cost millions of dollars.

cannot rely on these intermittent sources anyway. But a new natural gas-powered plant starting from scratch would probably not go on line until 2030, and one reason for that are the giant turbines at their core. They each take around four months to build, to which add trans-shipment of huge units and installation. A utility placing an order today faces a wait of three to four years.

The story for transformers is much the same. The average age of large power transformers is 38 years and the backlog across the industry runs to over two years.

outcomes

There seems to be scant awareness that fulfilling the steep rise in demand for power is more likely impossible than possible. How, in less than five years, can the massive U.S. power industry grow by the 17% mentioned above? The panjandrums of Silicon Valley may need to stow their dreams of rearranging how we live our lives because there’ll be a power outage.

There was once a quest to reduce carbon emissions and mitigate climate change, but instead the world has chased after two new fields — A.I. and bitcoin mining — both reliant on round-the-clock computing powered by natural-gas power plants. Tech companies have quietly let their emission pledges go up in smoke: Microsoft acknowledges that its emissions are 30% higher than in 2020 owing to its data centers. Google’s are up 50% over the same period. Eric Schmidt, who made his first billions running Google and is of course invested in and on the board of various A.I. companies, said artificial intelligence is too important to let climate worries get in the way. Quoted in The New York Times he said:

”We’re not going to hit the climate goals anyway, I’d rather bet on A.I. solving the problem.”

Billy Long Wants to Abolish the IRS

< appointments|100||Which made him Trump's pick for IRS commissioner.>

Billy Long was an auctioneer who then served as a congressman for 12 years representing a district in southwestern Missouri. He then made a failed bid for the Senate in article illustration
Billy Long.

2022. Having no experience running a large organization, Trump nevertheless named him commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service. After all, doesn’t Long describes himself on social media as a “certified tax and business adviser”? It was a credential bestowed on him after only a three-day course, which was revealed to The Springfield News-Leader by the tax consultancy that offered the course.

Confirmed in June, Billy Long lasted 53 days at the IRS. His removal has not been explained. He has been gotten rid of as ambassador to Iceland. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has taken the extra job of acting IRS commissioner. That makes him the eighth this year. Trump led off by prompting Biden appointee Danny Werfel to resign, a commissioner who was making progress bringing the woefully backward IRS into the 21st century.

fellow grifter

So, come and gone, but let’s examine just who Trump thought appropriate to run the IRS. We can start with Mr. Long’s having attempted to abolish the very agency he was appointed to run during his time in Congress. Not just once, but as a co-sponsor of bills in 2011, 2013, 2015, and 2017.

After he left Congress in 2023, he peddled some sort of “tribal” tax credit offered by an Arkansas-based oil and gas company that doesn’t seem worth learning about in detail because it was phony. The IRS confirmed that there was no such credit. Long claimed in his confirmation hearing that he didn’t realize the credits he was promoting were fake.

Long promoted another tax credit whose abuse has done considerable damage to the Treasury. Part of the CARES Act signed by Presidnt Trump in his first term, the employee retention plan gave tax credits to businesses of up to $10,000 per employee for keeping them on the payroll during the pandemic. It was expanded considerably by President Biden and has cost the government hundreds of billions more than originally anticipated.

Mr. Long did his part to aggravate the federal deficit by seeking companies that had not applied for the credits, encouraging and helping them to take advantage for a fee. He was not alone. It had become a business, with operators steering companies to apply for credits, all too often credits they did not deserve. Overwhelmed by the mountain of fraud that resulted, the IRS had to freeze the program in 2023. It has the enormous job of identifying and recovering tens of thousands of fraudulent payments with a staff reduced by thousands, thanks to Elon Musk’s DOGE purge that does the opposite of eliminating “waste, fraud, and abuse”.

Trump therefore chose to run the IRS someone who had worked against the IRS.

The mystery of Long’s removal to Iceland remains. The IRS makes the point that selling nonexistent tax credits could result in criminal prosecution. It is inconceivable that Pam Bondi’s Justice Department would indict one of their own, which makes giving Long a ticket to get out of town to discourage legal pursuit unlikely.

Maybe this story has a good ending. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch asks was Long’s short tenure because he did the right thing? Was he jettisoned because he refused the Department of Homeland Security request to turn over the personal data of millions so the Trump administration could search for taxpaying undocumented immigrants to deport?

Emil Bove Says ‘F—‘ the Courts

< appointments|94||So that makes him MAGA's ideal appellate court judge.>

Donald Trump rewarded the personal lawyers who represented him in his personal criminal and civil cases with top positions at the Justice Department: Pam Bondi is article illustration
Emil Bove.

the attorney general for having defended Trump at one of his impeachment trials; Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general, represented Mr. Trump at his Manhattan criminal trial. Emil Bove, another of Trump’s personal attorneys, was made Blanche’s principal deputy after also serving as a defense attorney for Trump in Manhattan.

Bove didn’t stay long at Main Justice, as the department is called. Wasting no time, Trump nominated Bove to become a judge on the Third Circuit Court of Appeals. In a Truth Social post, Trump included this ominous line: Bove will “do anything else that is necessary to, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN.”

When at Justice, Bove went promptly to work, engineering the pardons of the 1,600 insurrectionists who had stormed the Capitol in support of Trump’s attempted takeover of the United States government. He then conducted a purge at the DOJ, firing about two dozen lawyers who had prosecuted the insurrectionists. The victims are career public servants revenged for simply doing the jobs assigned to them. Bove called the prosecutions they brought a “grave national injustice.”

Trump’s massive abuse of the president’s pardon power and his pouty retributions, out to ruin people’s lives, are inversions of the law by any measure. Bove was only too willing to be the instrument of his vengeance.

lawfare

The Southern District of New York, where Bove had once worked, had a strong criminal case of corruption and fraud against the city’s mayor, Eric Adams. Bove stepped in and ordered New York to drop the charges, supposedly because Adams had pledged to help Trump’s immigrant deportation roundups. Former law clerk for Justice Antonin Scalia and just made acting U.S. Attorney, Danielle Sassoon resigned in refusal to comply with this flagrant breach of law. The dismissal was to be without prejudice, which meant that if Adams did not prove helpful, the charges against him could be reinstated – clearly a quid pro quo deal. A second attorney, Hagan Scotten, also quit with a memorable resignation letter:

”No system of ordered liberty can allow the government to use the carrot of dismissing charges, or the stick of threatening to bring them again, to induce an elected official to support its policy objectives… If no lawyer within earshot of the president is willing to give him that advice, then I expect you will eventually find someone who is enough of a fool, or enough of a coward, to file your motion. But it was never going to be me.”

past as prologue

When at the Southern District, an internal investigation charged Bove with mistreatment of subordinates. Mr. Bove was “quick to bully and threaten.”

He was accused of “unprofessional and unethical” behavior. It almost led to the demotion his colleagues requested. But Trump probably thought he had found another Roy Cohn.

Before the confirmation hearings, former Justice Department lawyer Erez Reuveni, who had been fired by Pam Bondi for admitting that Kilmar Abrego Garcia had been deported to a prison in El Salvador due to an “administrative error”, filed a whistle-blower complaint that quoted Bove saying in a March meeting that the Justice Department should consider saying “f— you” to courts that blocked deportation of immigrants under a dubious reading of the 1798 Alien Enemies Act. In his confirmation hearing, Bove said he did not recall saying that. “Doesn’t this seem like something a top official would remember saying?” asked The Wall Street Journal. Reuveni released communications to back up his account. In a March text message, when Trump’s deportation flights to El Salvador were about to land, Bove wrote. “Guess its find out time on the f— you.”

Democrats had walked out of the judiciary committee’s deliberation whether to clear Bove for a Senate vote, furious that Chairman Chuck Grassley (92 in September) had refused to let them voice their objections to Bove or hear directly from the whistle-blower. The full Senate vote to confirm was 50 to 49, with all Republicans, save for Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine, voting for Bove to take his seat on the bench.

It’s a lifetime appointment, but the suspicion is that Trump made this subservient lickspittle a judge to position him as a Supreme Court replacement. Next we may hear murmurings that Trump is trying to persuade Justice Samuel Alito, age 75, and Clarence Thomas, age 77, to step down. Bove is 44 and would be likely to affect rulings of the high court for another 30, even 40, years. How do you suppose the other justices would react to the appointment of a jurist who has shown he has no respect for the law?

Emil & Billy: Two Memorable MAGA Picks

< appointments|||>

In picking people for high office, Donald Trump values those who break laws and have no ethics; he knows he can count on them to do the same for him. Nothing should astonish us anymore, but at least we should record horrifics for the record. In two recent appointments, the President brings into sharper relief he has no concern for law.

<  ours to pay|||>

cartoon illustration
by Nate Beeler when at the Columbus Dispatch

Will Trump Have to Refund the Tariffs?

< the economy|285||>

His tariffs have settled in against 90 countries, the latest inflation report shows only a modest uptick, he insists, but a looming appellate court case nonetheless has President Trump throwing fits.

In May, a three-judge panel at the U.S. Court of International Trade (USCIT) in New York unanimously ruled that Trump went beyond his authority by implementing his vast menu of imposts. Tariffs are the prerogative of Congress is their point, and this special court is the expert on trade law. (The three judges were appointed by Reagan, Obama, and Trump.)

article illustration
Qingdao, China.


As he has done repeatedly, such as justifying sending U.S. troops into Los Angeles, Trump declared an emergency under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 (IEEPA) to gave himself the right to set tariffs in place of Congress. But the trade court said tariffs are dissociated from halting the emergency of fentanyl entering the country. The court wrote,

“A tax deals with a budget deficit by raising revenue. A dam deals with flooding by holding back a river. But there is no such association between the act of imposing a tariff and the ‘unusual and extraordinary threat[s]’ that the Trafficking Orders purport to combat.”

What if the appeals court also decides that the tariffs are illegal? Wouldn’t the Trump administration be required to refund all the tariffs collected to date?

The federal appeals court set dates in early June to hear from attorneys on both sides, but Trump’s lawyers have just sent a letter to the court which shows that a desperate loonyness has taken hold:

”If the United States were forced to pay back the trillions of dollars committed to us, America could go from strength to failure the moment such an incorrect decision took effect…the President believes that a forced dissolution of the agreements could lead to a 1929-style result. In such a scenario, people would be forced from their homes, millions of jobs would be eliminated, hard-working Americans would lose their savings, and even Social Security and Medicare could be threatened.”

First, tariffs collected so far come to $130 billion. The “trillions of dollars committed to us” presumably counts foreign pledges to invest in the United States, such as Japan’s commitment to invest $500 million in return for a tariff lowered to 15%. The lawyers absurdly paint the U.S. going “from strength to failure” for having to pay back money never received, money that is not a tariff subject to refund even if it were paid in.

And second, how would the refunding of $130 billion (out of a $6 trillion budget for fiscal 2026) bring about a “1929-style” collapse forcing people from their homes, costing them their savings, and so on? Wouldn’t our savings benefit from the refunds restoring pre-tariff prices at the local big box stores? This garment-rending is coming from an administration that had no qualms about passing the “Big Beautiful” budget bill that promises sinking the U.S. $3.5 trillion further into debt.

the other “Big Lie”

On Monday the President announced another 90-day truce with China. Had the previous pause expired, the U.S.was slated to ratchet up taxes on Chinese imports from an already high 30%, and Beijing would likely have responded in kind.

“We’ve been dealing very nicely with China as you probably have heard. They have tremendous tariffs that they’re paying to the United States of America.”

There it is again, the unending lie. He’s still trying to bamboozle even his own followers that foreign countries pay the tariffs rather than U.S. importers. He said it again in a Truth Social tweet:

“Trillions of dollars are being taken in on Tariffs, which has been incredible for our Country, its Stock Market, its General Wealth, and just about everything else. It has been proven, even at this late stage, Tariffs have not caused inflation or any other problem for America, other than massive amounts of CASH pouring into our Treasury coffers. Also, it’s been shown that, for the most part, Consumers aren’t even paying these Tariffs, it is mostly Companies and Governments, many of them Foreign, picking up the tabs.”

No, they don’t. The entirety of tariffs are paid within the U.S. at ports of entry, charged to importers by U.S. customs agents, and turned over to the federal government. “Companies” may refer to U.S. corporations for the moment trying to hold down prices to prevent angering customers, but that cannot be sustained. Companies such as Walmart operate on thin margins and cannot “eat” 15% tariffs without incurring huge losses.

Trump celebrates “massive amounts of CASH pouring into our Treasury coffers” but haven’t Americans caught on by now that they are, or soon will be, paying these massive amounts to the government in the form of higher prices?

the tariffs continue

The trade court consolidated two cases in rendering its decision, one filed by New York-based wine importer V.O.S. Selections and four smaller businesses, the second by twelve states. The White House immediately appealed and a federal appeals court granted an emergency motion to reinstate the tariffs so it could hear the President’s appeal. Arguments before the appeals court, sitting en banc, i.e. all its jurists, not just a three-judge panel, at end-July “didn’t go well for the government”, says The Wall Street Journal. That may explain why Trump’s lawyers thought their special pleading letter was needed.

Trump has now decreed eight phony emergencies. This publication foresaw this in January of 2019 in our article, Declaring an Emergency Gives the President Unchecked Power, which predicted Trump “will resort repeatedly to this detour around the Constitution to get his way.”

If the appeals court rules against the government, the case will of course move to the Supreme Court. Mr. Trump is already at work hoping to steer the outcome:

“The ruling by the U.S. Court of International Trade is so wrong, and so political! Hopefully, the Supreme Court will reverse this horrible, Country threatening decision, QUICKLY and DECISIVELY. Backroom ‘hustlers’ must not be allowed to destroy our Nation! The horrific decision stated that I would have to get the approval of Congress for these Tariffs. In other words, hundreds of politicians would sit around D.C. for weeks, and even months, trying to come to a conclusion as to what to charge other Countries that are treating us unfairly. If allowed to stand, this would completely destroy Presidential Power—The Presidency would never be the same!”

Destroying presidential power aside, his argument is not without reason if you think some tariffs are in order to partially offset the nation’s trade deficits with low-wage countries that have taken millions of our jobs.

pay back

If the appellate court rules against the government and mandates refunds of tariffs, it would be an unmanageable bureaucratic rat’s nest to try to figure out how much is owed to whom. Trump again, with strange notions of “wealth creation” and augury of financial collapse:

“If a Radical Left Court ruled against us at this late date, in an attempt to bring down or disturb the largest amount of money, wealth creation and influence the U.S.A. has ever seen, it would be impossible to ever recover, or pay back, these massive sums of money and honor. It would be 1929 all over again, a GREAT DEPRESSION!”

The Journal reacted with, “Wow. Ending a tax increase means depression. Who knew?”

In an interview, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent observed that:

“The amount of money that’s coming in here, I think the more deals we’ve done, the more money coming in, it gets harder and harder for SCOTUS to rule against this.”

And that’s what will happen. It will be so onerous to have to give the money back that the Supreme Court will just have to set the Constitution aside once again and rule that Trump’s illegal tariffs are legal.

Trump Says Give Him Numbers He Likes or You’re Out

<  the presidency|250||>

A reporter asked President Trump, “Why did you fire the head of the bureau of labor statistics?” He answered, “Because I think her numbers were wrong”.

If you didn’t know already, now you know that the America you once knew is gone. It is now a dictatorship where the man we still call “president” must be served only with data that conforms to his vision that we are living in his “Golden Age”.

Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics Dr. Erika McEntarfer was Senate-confirmed and is under a four-year contract. That is no impediment for a dictator.

expected job decline arrives

Friday’s jobs report dropped from preceding months to only 73,000 net new jobs created in July. Daniel Koh, who was chief of staff at the Labor Department during President Biden’s tenure, knows how labor statistics come to be:

”There are thousands of people who put together this report every month from hundreds of thousands of input data.”

But Trump, utterly ignorant of the ebb and flow of millions of jobs across the nation, thinks the data are wrong because they don’t fit his imaginary reality. He tweeted:

”In my opinion, today’s job numbers were RIGGED in order to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad.“

Business and government need reliable data to make decisions. The monthly job number, eagerly awaited by the financial markets on the first Friday of every month, is one of the key economic indicators tracked by government agencies. Because the job numbers from all over the country are assembled on a short timetable, they are subject to review as additional data comes to hand, and this often results in revision upward or downward for prior months. In this report, the bureau reduced the counts for May and June combined by 258,000 jobs. “So you know what I did? I fired her”, said Trump. “And you know what? I did the right thing.”

distrust

Interviewed Friday evening, economist Jared Bernstein said:

“When I saw the job numbers this morning I thought…it’s not quite a break glass moment yet but you’d better look for your hammer, because the job market has really slowed down a lot, and then when I saw him fire the commissioner, that’s a five-alarm fire… We should all be worried about this authoritarian move of trying to take control of the statistical agencies when you don’t like the numbers they deliver.”

We can now expect that other agency heads, quaking with fear, will either know to conjure numbers that will please Trump, however false, or know they’ll be fired if they report the truth, should the true numbers be negative. A reporter asked, “If any government official going forward is presenting data or information you don’t like, should they fear for their jobs?” Trump responded, “I’ve always had a problem with these numbers…We need people that we can trust”.

From Trump’s action, characteristically devoid of any forethought, we will see growing distrust in all government-reported numbers going forward. As the Trump regime continues to break contracts and laws, as his masked and unidentified secret police indiscriminately sweep thousands off the streets, half the electorate watches Fox News, Newsmax, OAN, Epoch Times where they are given only a sunny view of Trump’s golden age and kept in the dark about what’s really going on, such as Trump’s dismantling of the nation. This latest ominous action is being portrayed as nothing at all. Brian Kilmeade filled in on Fox Friday night right after Entarfer’s firing. Across two hours of primetime, he told his audience only this,

”Trump just pink-slipped the labor stats commissioner for putting out fake job numbers”.