Truth and Consequences

By Nick Catoggio

Monday, August 04, 2025

 

I have a dim memory of predicting last year or the year before that if Donald Trump returned to office he’d eventually get a bad jobs report and would throw a fit by firing the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

 

If I did predict it, I can’t find it. Searching my archives at this point is like trying to locate a passage you recall having read once during a visit to the local library—without remembering anything about which book you saw it in.

 

But even if I did predict it, so what? It takes no special foresight to anticipate that an authoritarian will behave like an authoritarian.

 

Terminating BLS Commissioner Erika McEntarfer because her agency delivered bad news on the economy is the most cartoonishly banana republic move Trump has pulled in his second term so far (that is, apart from shipping people off to prison in an actual banana republic without due process to be abused). It’s Caudillo-ism 101, enough so that Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro did nearly the same thing in June when he began arresting independent economists for contradicting his government’s official numbers on inflation and economic growth.

 

Granted, America hasn’t yet reached the stage where people like McEntarfer are being jailed for defying the Ministry of Truth, but give it time. We’re only six months into this administration. There’s still a lot of ball to be played.

 

Predicting that Trump would purge the BLS at some point was especially easy. He relishes the idea that he has an economic Midas touch because of the robust pre-pandemic job growth during his first term, and seems to understand that he won reelection because of it. He wasn’t about to sit by and let officials who serve under him ruin that reputation. And once the BLS signaled that it might, the manner in which he chose to respond was inevitable: Intimidation is his, and MAGA’s, one neat political trick. When all you have is a hammer, every “disloyal” bureaucrat’s job looks like a nail.

 

Beyond that, we’ve seen this movie before—repeatedly. In just the last four months, Trump’s administration has purged the CDC’s advisory panel on vaccines and a group of hundreds of experts compiling the National Climate Assessment for Congress. His reaction to the latest jobs report isn’t much different, in fact, from his reaction to the early spread of COVID in the United States in 2020. “If we stop testing right now, we’d have very few cases, if any,” the president famously complained. Then, as now, when confronted with information that might create trouble for him, his instinct is to suppress it.

 

Authoritarians are gonna authoritarian.

 

There are two points to be made about all of this. One is that accusing McEntarfer and the BLS of political bias is really stupid on the merits. The other is that, however stupid it may be, I think this move might end up achieving for Trump what he’s hoping to achieve.

 

Shooting the messenger.

 

It’s not just the lousy July numbers that are irksome and suspicious, the president said in a Truth Social post following Friday’s jobs report, it’s the fact that the BLS also revised its estimates of new jobs in May and June downward by 258,000. Surely that must be evidence of liberal bias, the umpteen-thousandth “deep state” plot to sabotage support for Donald Trump.

 

“This is the same Bureau of Labor Statistics that overstated the Jobs Growth in March 2024 by approximately 818,000,” he wrote, “and, then again, right before the 2024 Presidential Election, in August and September, by 112,000.” He accused McEntarfer of nothing less than having “faked the Jobs Numbers before the Election to try and boost Kamala’s chances of Victory.”

 

This is stupid.

 

The first reason it’s stupid is that, although it’s true that the BLS overstated job growth under Joe Biden early last year, it corrected the record before the election. It was a great political gift to Trump in late August 2024 when news broke that “U.S. job growth has been far weaker than initially reported.” A few months later, about 96 hours before Election Day, the BLS planted another wet kiss on him when it announced that a measly 12,000 jobs had been added in October. The agency had given voters nervous about the economy every reason to ditch the governing party.

 

If you’re the kind of simpleton who can’t understand political developments except through the prism of conspiratorial bias, it makes more sense to believe that the BLS put a thumb on the scale for Trump than for Kamala Harris.

 

The second reason it’s stupid is that the BLS commissioner doesn’t compile the jobs numbers herself, any more than the chairman of the Federal Reserve sets interest rates himself. “Those numbers are produced by the 2,000 nonpartisan career staff members who work in the agency, in this case compiling the survey responses from the more than 100,000 businesses that report their employment to the BLS every month,” former Obama economic adviser Jason Furman explained on Friday. “The numbers are finalized before they get to the commissioner.”

 

Trump singled out McEntarfer either because he hasn’t the faintest idea of how this stuff works—always a live possibility—or, as with Jerome Powell, because he regards bullying the head of the agency to be an efficient way to frighten everyone else who works there into complying with his demands.

 

The third reason it’s stupid is that Trump’s own policies are partly to blame for the BLS’ dramatic revisions in jobs numbers from month to month.

 

“Revisions are a normal part of the statistical process,” Furman noted, because the jobs data is based on surveys of business owners and workers, and some of those surveys trickle in late. But, since the pandemic, many have stopped trickling in altogether: Per National Review’s Dominic Pino, the response rate from employers has nosedived from 60 percent before COVID to 43 percent today. That means more guesswork month to month for the BLS. But instead of giving the bureau more tools to make those guesses better educated, the administration has been taking them away.

 

In June the agency announced that it would stop collecting economic data in three mid-sized cities (Buffalo, New York; Provo, Utah; and Lincoln, Nebraska) apparently the result of being short-staffed due to DOGE layoffs. Trump compounded that staffing problem earlier this year when he ordered a government-wide hiring freeze and offered buyouts to existing federal employees. Then—and tell me if this sounds familiar—his Commerce secretary purged an advisory panel of unpaid experts that had been working with the BLS to improve its survey response rates.

 

Having enfeebled an important federal statistical resource, Trump then used that enfeeblement as an excuse to decapitate it and give himself a pretext to appoint some partisan hack to lead it instead. Rendering the monthly BLS numbers untrustworthy will add one more sprinkle of needless economic uncertainty to the mountain of volatility he’s already amassed. Authoritarians are gonna authoritarian.

 

There’s a fourth way in which firing McEntarfer was stupid. Ironically, a weak jobs report combined with downward revisions of the May and June numbers greatly strengthens the president’s case to the Fed to lower interest rates. But Trump couldn’t seize the obvious opportunity here because his narcissism wouldn’t let him: He’d rather pretend that job growth is stronger than the BLS believes, undercutting his own argument for a rate cut, than allow that the economy is cooling off and needs some heat.

 

Stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid. But potentially effective.

 

Hiding the elephant.

 

Much of the commentary about this episode has ended with a warning to the president that, to quote Derek Thompson, “reality exists, whether or not you choose to measure it.”

 

The true state of the economy is an elephant that’s supposedly too big for him, or anyone, to hide. “As Biden and Kamala Harris learned the hard way, voters don’t judge the economy on the basis of jobs reports,” Jonathan Chait wrote on Friday at The Atlantic. “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.”

 

I take the point. But at this stage of national decline, any argument that depends on the good sense and basic intellectual integrity of Americans is an argument that’s leading with its chin.

 

Certainly, some evidence of economic decline can’t be hidden. If gas rises to $5 per gallon or the price of eggs jumps 40 percent, Trump has a problem. Voters won’t accept “fake stats!” as an explanation if their quality of life begins to deteriorate before their own eyes. The same goes for a truly bad recession: A MAGA-fied BLS can crank out one report after another about adding a million jobs a month, but Chait is right that Americans will notice if neighborhood businesses begin shuttering en masse. The size of the elephant matters.

 

Cooking the books won’t cut it in that case. The White House will need to resort to conspiracy theories instead—egg prices are being artificially manipulated by a Soros-led liberal egg cartel, the stock market is being shorted by McEntarfer-esque saboteurs desperate for Democrats to win the midterms, yadda yadda.

 

But what about a mild recession, the sort that in another era would trigger a wipeout at the polls despite falling well shy of a 2008-level economic calamity? You don’t think Trump and his accomplices in government and media could hide an elephant of that size?

 

They did okay “hiding” a global pandemic, didn’t they?

 

Trump presided over a once-in-a-century economic and public health catastrophe in 2020. He used his White House soapbox to push unproven folk remedies, to muse about the disease-curing potential of disinfectant, and, as I noted earlier, to argue insanely that we should be testing less. Nearly 250,000 people had died by Election Day that year. He barely lost.

 

Despite the death toll and the evidence of serious illness all around them, millions of right-wingers convinced themselves that COVID was “just the flu” and that many fatalities were being attributed to the virus mistakenly. (Patients were dying “with COVID,” not “of COVID,” they claimed.) Natural immunity was preferable to vaccine immunity, some would tell you, despite the obvious risks that the former carried. Nearly a third of Republicans have come to believe in the years since that diseases are less dangerous than the vaccines developed to prevent them, a huge jump from 2001. Afterward, Trump was so spooked by his base’s hostility to the COVID shot that was bankrolled by his first administration that he tried to avoid the topic.

 

In the end, the right hid the COVID elephant well enough to deliver 74 million votes for him in 2020 and make the outcome in swing states sufficiently close for him to cry “rigged!”

 

I frankly wonder whether he would have won outright if he had fired Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx early in 2020 and leaned all the way in on MAGA denialism about the danger from the virus. Had he thrown the full force of his strongman project into creating an alternate reality about the pandemic—fake case counts, steady “just the flu” messaging—might that have pushed him over the top in the battlegrounds?

 

If he could fight reality on COVID to a political near-draw, he can absolutely do it next year on the economy by pumping out bogus reports of 250,000 jobs added each month to counterprogram independent evidence that GDP is shrinking.

 

Willing dupes.

 

The thing to remember is that most Republicans don’t mind being fooled.

 

They came to the conclusion long ago that the best way to advance their political interests is to back Trump up on whatever he needs backing up on. “How is the economy actually doing?” is the wrong question. The right question is “How do we need the economy to be doing in order to maximize Trump’s hold on power?”

 

I wrote about that recently in the context of the Jeffrey Epstein saga. The president has always treated his supporters less as an audience that he’s trying to convince than as part of a communications team awaiting his instructions on how to convince others. Whether Karoline Leavitt believes the nonsense she says at the daily White House briefing is unimportant; she says it because she’s a loyal aide and has a job to do. The same goes for the average Trump voter, though. If you want to help your president, and therefore your country, you need to trust him to the exclusion of all other authorities, including the BLS.

 

I would put it this way: If the goal of grassroots Republican politics circa 2010 was to generate “epistemic closure” on the right, sealing out all politically threatening sources of information, the goal in 2025 is to try to expand that epistemic closure to the rest of the country. Convincing as many Americans as possible that the economy is great when it actually stinks is the point of Trumpism. His program isn’t fundamentally about policy; if it were, MAGA orthodoxy wouldn’t shift instantly every time the president’s own policy views shifted. His program is a way to understand reality, with its own internal moral code.

 

So if the president and his flunkies start babbling about hundreds of thousands of new jobs next year even as the press is reporting mass layoffs at big companies, many, many Republican voters will feel obliged—as always—to take their president’s side. At best, those Republicans might decide that the only intellectually honest thing to do in the face of conflicting evidence is to remain agnostic as to what’s true and what’s false. Which would be fine by Trump: If, in the middle of a recession, he and his supporters manage to convince Americans that the true state of the economy is “unknowable,” he’ll happily take that.

 

The inevitable consequence of reelecting him was that reality itself would gradually become a matter of dispute between the red team and the blue team as his daily political needs required. If a question as basic as “Who won the 2020 election?” can become the stuff of hot debate, a much more complicated one like “Is the economy growing or shrinking?” is ripe for exploitation. Authoritarians are gonna authoritarian.

 

All of which has me envying … Ukrainians, of all people.

 

I don’t envy them their war, of course. What I envy is the commitment to liberalism they displayed by showing out in force to protest the sleazy anti-anti-corruption law that was passed recently by Volodymyr Zelensky and the country’s parliament. Under the circumstances, it would have been easy for Ukrainians to ignore that in the name of maintaining national unity against the Russian aggressor; instead they mobilized, took to the streets, and forced parliament to hastily repeal it.

 

Compare that to the absolute stupefaction with which Americans have greeted Trump’s recent turn toward more aggressive authoritarianism, McEntarfer’s firing being just the latest example. The immense pay-for-play slush-fund racket he’s running would be enough to warrant impeachment in a better country, yet it’s only one small part of a corrupt program that’s getting bigger and more ambitious by the day. And still, the idea of mass demonstrations here over any of it is inconceivable.

 

Some might speculate that he’s gotten more aggressive lately to distract the public from Epstein, but I suspect the opposite is true—that he considers the Epstein uproar to be an unwelcome distraction from the truly important work of his presidency, like ridding the government of people with evidence that contradicts his understanding of reality. In fact, if there’s any relationship between Epstein and the BLS purge, it may be that Trump noted the outcry over the former and correctly surmised that Americans will react far more strongly to conspiracy theories about a dead pedophile than to him deliberately wrecking their government’s ability to provide accurate economic data that investors and businesses around the world rely on.

 

What decadent, soporific, servile schmucks we’ve become. However embarrassed you are that America has come to this, you’re not embarrassed enough.