Donald Trump’s decision to fire Erika McEntarfer, the Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), brings back memories of Richard Nixon’s orders to identify Jews at the Labor Department. Both efforts stem from paranoid delusions that the people producing the economic data were involved in a conspiracy to make them look bad.

Nixon’s anger stemmed from the fact that the country was in a bad recession. This showed clearly in the unemployment rate, which had risen from 3.4 percent when he took office in January of 1969, to 6.1 percent by December of 1970. Rather than accepting that his policies might be to blame, Nixon was convinced that people, Jewish people, were involved in a conspiracy to cook the data to make him look bad.

In the same vein, Trump seems to have convinced himself that there is a conspiracy, involving at least former BLS Commissioner McEntarfer, to make him look bad. While we may not yet be in a recession, the economy is clearly slowing, as reflected in both GDP data and much slower jobs growth.

Just as Nixon’s Jew counting was driven by his life-long antisemitism, Trump’s rage against McEntarfer is driven by bizarre paranoia. While his administration has tried to clean up the story and say Trump was unhappy about large revisions to the jobs data, which means the original counts were inaccurate, his actual statement is very clear that he was accusing McEntarfer of bias, not incompetence.

“I was just informed that our Country’s “Jobs Numbers” are being produced by a Biden Appointee, Dr. Erika McEntarfer, the Commissioner of Labor Statistics, who faked the Jobs Numbers before the Election to try and boost Kamala’s chances of Victory. This is the same Bureau of Labor Statistics that overstated the Jobs Growth in March 2024 by approximately 818,000 and, then again, right before the 2024 Presidential Election, in August and September, by 112,000. These were Records — No one can be that wrong?”

There is no ambiguity in Trump’s Truth Social post. He is very explicit, saying “no one can be that wrong.” He is not saying that McEntarfer is incompetent, he is saying that she is out to get him.

This allegation is based entirely on Trump’s paranoia and/or dementia. The revisions to the data last year were made in August, more than two full months before the election. It’s hard to see how it could possibly have helped Biden or Harris to have big stories about a large downward revision to job growth occurring appearing shortly before the election.

Somehow Trump has convinced himself that the revisions took place after the election. Apparently, no one on the White House staff has the courage to correct his mistake on this simple fact.

The other big problem with the White House’s clean-up effort to claim that the firing is based on the inaccuracy of the data, and therefore McEntarfer’s alleged incompetence, is that it shows absolutely zero understanding of the process involved in collecting the data. McEntarfer overseas the process, but BLS  uses procedures that have been developed over decades and which are entirely transparent. They publish their methods for any interested researcher, reporter, or lay person to evaluate and criticize.

If Trump and his economic team think these methods are inadequate, they presumably have some suggestions as to how they can be improved. They have offered nothing.

For what it’s worth, former Commissioner McEntarfer would not even have had authority to make major changs in procedures on her own. She would have had to submit a concrete proposal for restructuring the Bureau’s methods and to ask permission and funding from Congress. The Trump administration has been cutting the BLS budget and staff.

In short, the effort to sanewash the firing as based on a concern about inaccurate data is absurd on its face and directly contradicts Trump’s own statement. The firing was driven by Trump craziness, just as Nixon’s Jew-counting was driven by his antisemitism and paranoia. That’s the truth.

This first appeared on Dean Baker’s Beat the Press blog.

 

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