Broadly speaking, Donald Trump’s authoritarian moves come in two flavors. The first is devious plans that help him amass power (say, turning the Departments of Justice and Defense over to lackeys, or using regulatory threats to bully media owners into favorable coverage). The second is foolish impulses that he follows because they make him feel momentarily better.
Firing Erika McEntarfer, the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, as Trump did via a Truth Social post this afternoon, falls into the second category.
McEntarfer’s unpardonable sin was to oversee the routine release of BLS jobs data. This morning’s report showed that job growth last month fell somewhat short of expectations. The more interesting—and, to Trump, unwelcome—information came in its revisions, which found that previous months had much lower job growth than previous estimates. Economists had been puzzling over the economy’s resilience despite Trump’s imposition of staggering tariffs. Now that we have the revised data, that resilience appears to have largely been a mirage.
[Rogé Karma: The mystery of the strong economy has finally been solved]
Trump went with the familiar “fake news” defense. McEntarfer, he posted, had ginned up fake numbers to make him look bad. “We need accurate Jobs Numbers,” he wrote. “I have directed my Team to fire this Biden Political Appointee, IMMEDIATELY. She will be replaced with someone much more competent and qualified. Important numbers like this must be fair and accurate, they can’t be manipulated for political purposes.”
The backdrop to Trump’s move, and the reason observers are shocked but not surprised, is that the suspicion that jobs numbers are faked to help Democrats has circulated on the right for years. When a strong jobs report came out in October 2012, during Barack Obama’s reelection campaign, the former General Electric CEO Jack Welch tweeted, “Unbelievable jobs numbers..these Chicago guys will do anything..can’t debate so change numbers.”
Welch’s tweet was considered somewhat unhinged at the time, but like many paranoid forms of conservative thought, it gradually made its way into the Republican mainstream. Trump himself has spent years insisting that economic numbers were made up, regularly denouncing every positive jobs report during the Obama era as fake. And so, when this morning’s report came out, his lizard brain was primed to act: Bureaucrat say Trump economy bad. Trump fire bureaucrat. Now economy good.
One problem with this move, even from the narrow standpoint of Trump’s self-interest, is that his complaints with economic statistics don’t fit together logically. Revisions of past numbers are a normal part of BLS methodology. Every monthly report is a projection based on limited information, so the Bureau continues to update its findings. Last August, the BLS revised previous months’ job numbers downward. This was obviously a bad thing for the Biden administration, but Republicans decided that it was in fact evidence that the BLS had been cooking the books to make the economy look good. (They did not address the apparent puzzle of why it finally came clean, months before the election.) Now that Trump is president, however, downward revisions prove that the BLS is cooking the books to make the economy look bad.
The most prominent exponent of these incoherent theories is, of course, Trump himself. In his post firing the BLS commissioner, Trump cited the downward revisions as evidence that she was faking the numbers to hurt him: “McEntarfer said there were only 73,000 Jobs added (a shock!) but, more importantly, that a major mistake was made by them, 258,000 Jobs downward, in the prior two months.”
In another post an hour and a half later, he cited last year’s revisions as evidence that she had faked the numbers to make Joe Biden look good: “Today’s Jobs Numbers were RIGGED in order to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad — Just like when they had three great days around the 2024 Presidential Election, and then, those numbers were ‘taken away’ on November 15, 2024, right after the Election, when the Jobs Numbers were massively revised DOWNWARD, making a correction of over 818,000 Jobs — A TOTAL SCAM.” (The truth, as we’ve seen, is that the downward revisions under Biden were announced last August, not after the election, but never mind.)
Trump’s anger with government statisticians also runs headlong into his feud with Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell. Trump has been raging against Powell for being too slow, in Trump’s view, to cut interest rates. But cutting interest rates is what the Fed does when the economy is weak. When the economy is growing fast, it keeps rates high to avoid overheating. Trump is thus simultaneously claiming that the economy is stronger than people think and that Powell should act as if it’s weaker than people think. He also blames Powell for failing to change policy quickly enough, when, according to Trump himself, the most important data Powell would use to make this decision are unreliable.
[Jonathan Chait: What Trump’s feud with Jerome Powell is really about]
Trump’s deeper confusion is his apparent belief that reported job numbers are what matter to him politically. He is obsessed with propaganda and has had phenomenal success manipulating the media and bullying his party into repeating even his most fantastical lies. But, as Biden and Kamala Harris learned the hard way, voters don’t judge the economy on the basis of jobs reports. They judge it on the basis of how they and their community are doing. You can’t fool the public with fake numbers into thinking the economy is better than it is. All fake numbers can do is make it harder for policy makers to steer the economy.
The president’s mad rush to subject the macroeconomic policy makers to the same partisan discipline he has imposed on the power ministries is less a coup than a temper tantrum. He thinks he wants loyalists and hacks running those functions. He might not like what happens when he gets his way.