Facing facts about Trump and the jobs numbers

The Hill

6 days ago

In announcing the firing of the government's chief labor statistician last week, President Trump condemned the works of Erika McEntarfer as 'phony.'
McEntarfer was just the 16th commissioner of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics since the position was created by Congress in 1884 to keep track of unemployment during an ongoing depression of a very Gilded Age variety. The job is to produce consistent, reliable data that Congress and other agencies can use for setting their own policies.
What we have turned it into, however, is some kind of political rhabdomancer, an oracle on whose divinations the results of elections supposedly hang. But, like most good governance, it's actually really boring.
McEntarfer was confirmed by the Senate by a richly bipartisan vote of 86-8 to a four-year term that began in 2024. But there's no doubt that Trump was within his powers to fire her. All of the other counters of beans at the bureau are civil servants, but not the bean-counter in chief, who has always been a political appointee — which McEntarfer became only after more than 20 years in various statistical gigs as a federal worker bee.
Until Friday, she managed the bureau and her name was on the reports, but the numbers are churned out by a hive of statisticians and researchers working in the old Post Office building next to Washington's Union Station. The deputy commissioner, civil servant William Wiatrowski, will again serve as acting commissioner, as he has twice before during vacancies.
We'll see what Trump thinks of Wiatrowski and the data nerds' August numbers when they come out on the first Friday of September. The president has vowed to pick an 'exceptional replacement' for McEntarfer, and that is probably true. There will be many exceptions concerning whomever Trump sends to the Senate for confirmation to the post. In the meantime, if the August numbers are as glum as the rest of this summers', Trump may start firing his way through acting commissioners until he finds one who sees the 'great Republican Success' the president claims McEntarfer was concealing.
But he can burn that bridge when he comes to it. For now, let's think about why Trump fired McEntarfer and what he meant by 'phony.'
'Days before the election, [McEntarfer] came out with these beautiful numbers for Kamala, I guess Biden-Kamala, and she came out with these beautiful numbers trying to get somebody else elected,' Trump told reporters Friday. 'Then, right after the election, she had an [$800,000] or $900,000 massive reduction — said she made a mistake.'
The fact is that the single poorest employment report of McEntarfer's tenure was the one she published three days before the 2024 election, in which the bureau reported Nov. 1 that the economy had created only 12,000 new jobs in October, a worrisome sign for former President Biden and former Vice President Kamala Harris. There was indeed a revision to those numbers after the election: a substantial increase to 43,000, reflecting the bureau's conclusion that the fall hurricane season had distorted the overall jobs picture.
It is true, though, that Trump did complain bitterly 10 weeks before the election about the long-term revisions to the bureau's 2023 numbers that concluded the economy had added more than 800,000 fewer jobs in the previous year than initially estimated under McEntarfer's predecessor. Insofar as jobs numbers — rather than actual jobs — affect the attitude of voters, McEntarfer's bureau had given Trump a gift. But Trump was more focused on the revision itself, not the report, writing, 'the Harris-Biden administration has been caught fraudulently manipulating Job Statistics.'
If the Biden-Harris administration had been cooking the books, then why on earth would it announce such a thing during the height of the campaign, on Aug. 21, the third day of the Democratic National Convention? If Trump's goal was to knock the incumbent administration's economic policies, McEntarfer & Co. had just served up a very juicy pitch, but Trump largely ignored it in favor of the allegation of corruption.
It is possible that Friday, Trump confused the August downward revision with the November report, and that he unknowingly conflated the two events to fit his preferred narrative. But whether it was a premedicated lie or self-deception isn't really the essential point. The episode shows us what Trump thinks about data in general.
Whether it is election returns or economic reports, none of it can be trusted, unless it has been provided by 'his own people.' Thus we come to a fork in the road: Is it that Trump believes it is possible for data to be unhappy for him and accurate, but only if he chooses the people who collect the data, or, is it closer to his way of thinking that data are mostly phony and he just prefers to be the one in whose favor it is being rigged?
If it is the former, that comes with its own problems. Once a leader has installed loyalists in charge of data gathering, those loyalists out of some combination of love, ambition and fear will be motivated to hide bad news. A government that loses the ability to tell itself the truth is doomed, with terrible consequences for its citizens.
But what if it's the latter, and Trump doesn't put much stock in data as anything more than a tool for marketing, messaging and politics? This is the kind of thinking that might be behind asking an elections official to 'find' enough votes to overturn an election. If Trump assumes that the blue state election returns are phony, why shouldn't Republicans provide phony vote totals for his benefit?
Whether it's the Georgia secretary of state, the chair of the Federal Reserve, his own vice president or the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, if Trump assumes that all findings are the work of political malfeasance, why shouldn't they be malfeasing in his favor? Unhappy findings, therefore, can't be matters of fact or sincere interpretation, they can only be, as Trump would say, 'nice' or 'not nice.'
Writing in 1942 about his recollections of fighting in the Spanish Civil War years before, George Orwell framed out how first Spain and then all of Europe had been plunged into hellish madness over the course of less than a decade. What he concluded wasn't that old saw that 'truth is the first causality of war,' but rather that the death of truth is part of what leads us to war.
'I know it is the fashion to say that most of recorded history is lies anyway. I am willing to believe that history is for the most part inaccurate and biased,' he wrote. 'but what is peculiar to our own age is the abandonment of the idea that history could be truthfully written.'
It's not that employment data aren't ever wrong, it's that in a functional republic, we believe that such data can be found through an imperfect, iterative process that is pointing at something real. If we abandon that idea, then all that's left is the party line.
The would-be information czars of the COVID-era and the dis-disinformation apparatus that sprang up in response to the wilderness of online life, including that part of the wilderness planted by Trump himself, frequently devoted itself to fighting 'wrong' ideas and 'bad' opinions. It was often Orwellian in its own way, fact-checking subjective assessments.
But the real fight for the future isn't about what people think, but rather what people believe can be known. We may already be living in a post-truth era, but God help us if we are beyond caring about facts.