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