Donald Trump just put a “spotlight” on his own fear that his empire is crumbling, according to a New York Times columnist.
NYT opinion columnist Michelle Cottle expressed the statement in a piece from three opinion writers “on Trump’s most recent power grabs.”
Speaking to fellow NYT writers Jamelle Bouie and Steven Rattner, Cottle started out the conversation by saying, “The White House wrecking ball just keeps on swinging this summer as President Trump pursues his passion for undermining key American institutions.”
“Just the past couple of weeks, we’ve seen the White House fire the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the agency responsible for providing unbiased info on the labor market, because the president was displeased with a jobs report,” she added. “Meanwhile, and this is my personal obsession, Republican state lawmakers in Texas, at Trump’s command, redrew the state’s congressional map to give the G.O.P. five more House seats.”
Cottle added, “Practically speaking, these moves don’t seem to have much to do with each other, but they both spotlight just how far this president will go to destroy public trust in vital institutions. And that is what I want to talk about today.”
On Trump firing a jobs official after a disappointing report, Bouie said, “You can change the numbers they report to make you look better, but that doesn’t change the underlying reality of what’s happening in the economy or the underlying reality of what’s happening in anything if you’re going to just change the numbers — to juke the stats, if you will.”
“And so the president can put pressure on the nation’s statisticians to make him look good, but if the underlying conditions are actually on the downturn, if things are actually getting worse for people, then the only thing he’s done is made it more difficult for his government to respond to whatever is bubbling up from the surface,” Bouie then added.
That led Cottle to say, “That’s what I was going to ask you both: This move by Trump sort of spotlights his panic about what’s happening, certainly how it will impact his party’s fortunes and whether he keeps a death grip on the government going forward.”
“I think our assumption has always been that no matter what the numbers say, if people start to feel some pain, it’s going to come back and then you will start to see some pushback,” she added before asking, “Do you think that the tariffs and what we’ve got coming and the softening job numbers are the beginning of what Trump has been worried about? Or at least what his party has been worried about in terms of people actually being able to see what’s going on?”