I wonder what the tranquilizer intake is like at the White House? I’m specifically thinking of Susie Wiles, who is supposed to be Trump’s chief of staff and running the show. In conventional terms, that equates to “nothing happens unless the CoS approves it,” but you know in the Trump White House that nobody sane even hears about these excesses until they get them over the airwaves, like the rest of us. Trump did a very very stupid thing yesterday (no, not the nuclear subs, we’ll get to that in a moment) we speak of the firing of Erika McEntarfer, for producing job numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics that Donald didn’t like. So off the handle he flew, thereby painting himself into the corner. This is a lose/lose situation.
While there are plenty of heated debates over flaws in the current system for measuring jobs numbers, those have to do with more academic disagreements over the proper ways of collecting or modeling data. The people who work at BLS tend to be statistics nerds, and there isn’t a strong case that the numbers are manipulated from month to month to advance specific partisan goals.
Last summer, the Trump campaign claimed that a positive jobs report amounted to pro-Harris “election interference.” Yet the final jobs report days before the election was a disaster for Harris that showed just 12,000 jobs added last October — the slowest growth in years. If the BLS were manipulating numbers to help her, why would they release a terrible report at that time?
Also, Trump is complaining about the downward revisions to prior months’ numbers. But that means that for several months of his presidency the BLS has been overstating job growth in his favor.
The baseless charges will help undermine public confidence in yet another American institution, which will also create less certainty for investors.
But it’s also hard to see how this helps Trump.
If Trump installs somebody at BLS who produces great numbers, anybody who isn’t already one of his supporters will dismiss them and assume that the appointee was producing the positive data to keep the boss happy. And if the numbers produced by his own appointee turn out to be bad, it will make them even more convincing. Democrats will be able to argue that Trump’s hand-picked commissioner released numbers showing that the economy is lousy.
That is the plain, common sense reality of the situation. Trump has no way out because he left himself no way out. The text in bold is it, lose/lose: Good data will mean faked by a sycophant, bad data will mean carved in stone because it’s coming from a Trump loyalist.
So what is he going to do? At least with the previous person in the post, the BLS still had credibility. The numbers have been going up and down for many years. That’s what these things do. But now, Trump has thrown a monkey wrench into a situation which could have conceivably saved him, if his numbers stabilized at some point, for example.
But what is he going to say now? And there have already been jokes about Karoline “Those Lips” Leavitt announcing “one million new jobs in August,” but that might actually be what’s in the road ahead. And she’ll say it with a straight face, too.
Remember, we deal with an unstable elderly man who only lives to cheat at his next golf game. He’s back in the Oval Office because it beats trials and prison, which was the alternate life path facing him. So he really doesn’t give a rat’s ass what happens to the economy. The rest of us, though, will have to pick up the pieces and clean up the mess. And we’ll do it flying blind, getting data from unemployment offices, job search recruiting boards, union data, you name it.
If there is one industry which is going to grow up overnight and boom, it will be the government labor statistics industry, minus the government. Necessity is the mother of invention and we need this industry and stat. A new report is due in 29 days.
