You don’t need to be Sherlock Holmes to have deduced that this would logically happen. All of the signs were there and God knows that the necessity to hide the truth was. You recall how months ago Donald Trump got massively miffed over the fact that the jobs reports were not coming up as he wanted them to. He was beside himself and so he fired the statistician who was posting “fake” data. It wasn’t fake at all, it merely was not flattering — which in Trump speak is the prima facie definition of “fake” whether it’s news, statistics, you name it. That key termination took place months ago and during the government shutdown, of course it wasn’t addressed. How could it be when the entire government was on a skeleton crew? But now all that’s over and here’s how job reports and stats are being handled, as described by “machine gun lips” herself. (Fast forward to 01:20:01 if it doesn’t begin for you there.)
Do you love it? It’s not just a TEMPORARY glitch in records keeping, oh my God no. No, now it’s PERMANENT, we will never know from now until the time the sun goes nova what we used to be able to assess like clockwork every four weeks and come up with figures.
Leavitt says, hilariously, that the government is flying blind. Only because it’s decided to close its eyes and put on goggles and draw the shades. The information is still there, the mechanisms for determining the information is still there, and presumably not all the people who know how to do the work have been fired.
Yet Leavitt wants you to believe that the Democrats just up and permanently disabled the Bureau of Labor Statistics one day, just out of the clear blue. As Ron Filipkowski pointed out, this is how a dictatorship works.
And think about how sobering this is for a moment: No president, no matter how bad things got, has ever seen fit to throw a monkey wrench into the works like this. This is pure Orwell. This is literally memory holing the bureau that provides us with labor statistics. But at least in 1984 there was a lie to cover it up.
Trump doesn’t bother with the cover up lie. He brags about how this is the “best economy ever” but he doesn’t come up with “that’s why we have a jobs report of such and such.” He won’t (or can’t) make up the figures. And maybe that’s where his cronies draw the line. I’m sure that Trump has spoken to Scott Bessent about this issue. How could he not? And I’m willing to bet that Bessent doesn’t want to touch it with a 50-foot pole.
So blind we go, and of course the blindness is blamed on something that the MAGA base might swallow.
But the real problem here is that eventually (and it won’t take that long) the fact that there’s unemployment and nobody really knows what’s what or what to reasonably expect is going to blow up. And there will be hell to pay. Trump can get up and lie on TV all he wants to. It’s like lying during COVID that everything was fine when the grocery shelves were barren. It’s not.going.to.work. Get ready for one hell of an explosion when this goes.
The only other time I can recall of an administration engaging in the kind of numbers finagling–and it was nowhere this outlandish–was when Reagan decided to “lower” the official unemployment statistics was by including active-duty military personnel in the “fully employed” category. For about 3 or 4 months, news organizations would mention both (as “today’s unemployment rate stands at 7.7%; excluding military personnel, the number stands at 7.9%”) but there was never that drastic a difference (usually only a 0.1 or 0.2% difference).
Isn’t it odd that it’s always republicans fiddling with the figures?