On Friday, Donald Trump fired Erika McEntarfer, the head of the Bureau of Labor
Statistics, for the crime of doing her job.
Earlier that day, the BLMS had released new jobs numbers that showed anemic
growth in July—just 73,000 jobs were added—and revised numbers for May and June that showed decreases in total jobs for those months. Overall, the picture was bleak: Just 106,000 jobs added over three months. The
president, unsurprisingly, was furious, and as such immediately began alleging an elaborate and nonsensical conspiracy to
undermine his own administration. “Important numbers like this must be fair
and accurate, they can’t be manipulated for political purposes,” Trump
wrote on his bespoke social network Truth Social.
McEntarfer wasn’t the only
federal employee in his sights; he also took the opportunity to lambast Fed chair Jerome Powell, who has long been a target of his ire. “The Economy is BOOMING under TRUMP,” he wrote in a wild run-on sentence with a variety of punctuation, “despite
a Fed that also plays games, this time with Interest Rates, where they lowered
them twice, and substantially, just before the Presidential Election, I assume
in the hopes of getting ‘Kamala’ elected – How did that work out? Jerome ‘Too
Late’ Powell should also be put ‘out to pasture.” (Powell was appointed by
Trump in 2018.)
Trump is right, obviously, to be upset about the jobs
numbers. They’re really bad—the worst
numbers since the height of the Covid pandemic. Before that, the last time
there were jobs numbers this bad was during the Great Recession. But Trump, although he will never admit it, has
no one to blame for the state of the economy but himself. His decision to fire
McEntarfer—and, as a result, cast doubt on the reliability of all future data, not just from the Bureau of Labor Statistics but from any economic agency—will
only make things worse.
After six months of deportations, purges, and
chaos, it’s easy to forget that the primary reason voters sent Donald Trump back to the White House was their widespread displeasure about post-pandemic inflation, which they blamed on Joe Biden. Prices ballooned during his presidency thanks to a variety of factors—shifts in consumer demand, supply chain disruption, even the war in Ukraine—few of which he had the administration had any real control over. By the time they stabilized, it was
too late for Biden. By the end of his first year in office, a solid majority
had concluded that inflation was his fault. It wasn’t—but that hardly mattered.
Trump won in large part because he was in
charge of the economy the last time it was good—in the period leading up the
pandemic—and because, for whatever reason, voters didn’t blame him when
Covid-19 caused it to collapse. There were certainly other factors that played
a role in his 2024 victory—Biden’s age, his steadfast support for Israel’s genocidal
war in Gaza, Kamala Harris’s decision to run a cautious campaign despite having
only 107 days to press her case. But inflation was the primary driver. A lot of
voters hated the Biden economy and didn’t give the administration credit for
getting inflation under control. They wanted something different. They got it.
Despite voters’ dissatisfaction with it, the economy Trump inherited from Biden was
actually pretty good: Unemployment was low and inflation was under control. In
six months, Trump has done everything possible to destroy it. Next Friday will
mark the third installment of “Liberation Day,” the nonsensical tariff regime he
has imposed on most of the rest of the world, hitting key allies and trading
partners like Canada and the European Union particularly hard.
These
tariffs have caused the stock market to crash (though it has subsequently rebounded, sort of),
prices to rise, and have ruptured a world economic order that America built for
its own benefit. Many of our closest allies are now rethinking their
relationships with the United States. Meanwhile, Trump has brayed about tariffs raking in
$150 billion in revenue—a number that sounds big until you remember that it
is literally a tax on American citizens. In just six months, the economy looks
a lot like it did during the first half of Biden’s term: layoffs, inflation,
instability. The big difference is that without Trump—and specifically without
Trump’s tariffs—none of this would be happening.
The firing of McEntarfer makes a bad situation
significantly worse. It’s hard to think of a more unnecessary or more brutal act of
economic self-destruction than, in one swoop, to shatter the integrity of the economic data produced by the federal government. If McEntarfer is removed—and it looks like she will be—then every statistic
produced during the rest of Trump’s term will be suspect. It was already hard
to run a business, given the general instability and the insanity of Trump’s tariffs.
Now, given the lack of reliable economic data, it will be even harder.
Five years ago, at the height of the pandemic, Trump attempted to pressure agencies to lower the number of reported Covid-19 cases—all so he could seem like he had things under control. He’s now attempting to manipulate jobs numbers in a similar way. It didn’t work then. It won’t work now.