Donald Trump’s shock dismissal of Bureau of Labor Statistics Commissioner Erika McEntarfer over disappointing jobs numbers has experts warning that the ‘irked’ president’s knee-jerk reaction may have spiraled America’s economy into a chaos that could last decades.
The firing came after July’s dismal jobs report showed only 73,000 new positions created, with previous months revised downward by a staggering 258,000 jobs—numbers that directly contradicted Trump’s grandiose claims of a new “golden age.”
“BLS is the finest statistical agency in the entire world. Its numbers are trusted all over the world,” former BLS Commissioner William Beach told CNN’s “State of the Union.” Beach warned that “the president’s attack on the commissioner and on the bureau is undermining that infrastructure, could undermine that trust over the long term.”
“Trump was irked,” wrote CNN’s Stephen Collinson Monday.
He went on, “One big danger now is that Trump’s economic fabulism will gather its own momentum and infect confidence in government statistics that will long outlive his presidency.
“Employment data is published as part of a multilayered process that would be almost impossible for one official to corrupt. But if Trump appoints a politicized official to head the BLS with an incentive to please him, the pressure on officials to produce corrupted data would be intense. If jobs numbers are worse next month, will he fire someone else? And if the numbers improve, will anyone believe in their integrity?”
Trump’s cronies scrambled to defend the firing on Sunday’s talk shows. White House Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett declared that “the president wants his own people there so that when we see the numbers, they’re more transparent and more reliable.”
The move represents Trump’s latest assault on independent institutions, following his pattern of attacking anyone who dares present facts that contradict his alternate reality. As one expert noted, Trump’s behavior mirrors that of “populist authoritarian strongmen leaders such as Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán or Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.”
This isn’t Trump’s first rodeo with reality denial, Collinson wrote. During his presidency, he infamously told supporters, “Just remember, what you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening”—a mantra that guided his COVID-19 response and culminated in his “Big Lie” about the 2020 election.
The economic implications are severe. When countries politicize official data, they “risk ending up like Argentina or Greece, where the invention of rosy statistics masked economic malaise and sparked financial crises,” Collinson wrote.
Trump’s second term has devolved into what observers call an “Orwellian” exercise in rewriting reality.
“Suppose that they get a new commissioner,” Beach warned, “and they do a bad number. Well, everybody’s going to think, ‘Well, it’s not as bad as it probably really is,’ because they’re going to suspect political influence.”
America’s economic credibility—built over generations—now hangs in the balance, Collinson concluded.