The America we knew is rapidly slipping away
He fired Erika McEntarfer, the Senate-confirmed head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, for bringing him economic news he did not like, and in the hours immediately following, the second most dangerous thing happened: The senior Trump officials most responsible for running our economy — people who in their private businesses never would have contemplated firing a subordinate who brought them financial data they did not like — all went along for the ride.
Rather than saying to Trump: 'Mr President, if you don't reconsider this decision — if you fire the top labour bureau statistician because she brought you bad economic news — how will anyone in the future trust that office when it issues good news' — they immediately covered for him.
As The Wall Street Journal pointed out, Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer had actually gone on Bloomberg TV early on Friday and declared that even though the jobs report that had just been released was revised downward for May and June, 'we've seen positive job growth.' But as soon as she got the news hours later that Trump had fired the very BLS director who reports to her, she wrote on X: 'I agree wholeheartedly with @POTUS that our jobs numbers must be fair, accurate, and never manipulated for political purposes.' As the Journal asked: 'So were the jobs data that were 'positive' in the morning rigged by the afternoon?' Of course not.
Going forward, how many government bureaucrats are going to dare to pass along bad news when they know that their bosses — people like Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, the director of the National Economic Council, Kevin Hassett, the Labor Secretary Chavez-DeRemer and the US trade representative Jamieson Greer — will not only fail to defend them but will actually offer them up as a sacrifice to Trump to keep their jobs? Shame on each and every one of them — particularly on Bessent, a former hedge fund manager, who knows better and did not step in. What a coward. As Bessent's predecessor, Janet Yellen, the former Treasury secretary and also the former chair of the Federal Reserve — and a person with actual integrity — told my Times colleague Ben Casselman of the BLS firing: 'This is the kind of thing you would only expect to see in a banana republic.' It is important to know how foreigners are looking at this. Bill Blain, a London-based bond trader who publishes a newsletter popular among market experts called Blain's Morning Porridge, wrote on Monday: 'Friday, Aug. 1 might go down in history as the day the US Treasury market died. There was an art to reading US data. It relied on trust. Now that is broken — if you can't trust the data, what can you trust?' In May, the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, fired two top intelligence officials who oversaw an assessment that contradicted Trump's assertions that the gang Tren de Aragua was operating under the direction of the Venezuelan regime. Their assessment undermined the dubious legal rationale Trump invoked — the rarely used 1798 Alien Enemies Act — to allow the suspected gang members to be thrown out of the country without due process.
And now this trend towards self-blinding is spreading to further corners of the government.
One of America's premier cyberwarriors, Jen Easterly, who was the director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency during the Biden administration, had her appointment to a senior teaching position at the US Military Academy at West Point revoked last week by Army Secretary Daniel Driscoll after Laura Loomer, a far-right conspiracy theorist, posted that Easterly was a Biden-era mole.
Read that sentence again very slowly. The Army secretary, acting on the guidance of a loony Trump acolyte, revoked the teaching appointment of — anyone will tell you — one of America's most skilled nonpartisan cyberwarriors, herself a graduate of West Point.
And when you are done reading that, read Easterly's response on LinkedIn: 'As a lifelong independent, I've served our nation in peacetime and combat under Republican and Democratic administrations. I've led missions at home and abroad to protect all Americans from vicious terrorists .... I've worked my entire career not as a partisan, but as a patriot — not in pursuit of power, but in service to the country I love and in loyalty to the Constitution I swore to protect and defend, against all enemies.' And then she added this advice to the young West Pointers she will not have the honour of teaching: 'Every member of the Long Gray Line knows the Cadet Prayer. It asks that we 'choose the harder right instead of the easier wrong.' That line — so simple, yet so powerful — has been my North Star for more than three decades. In boardrooms and war rooms. In quiet moments of doubt and in public acts of leadership. The harder right is never easy. That's the whole point.' That is the woman Trump did not want teaching our next generation of fighters.
And that ethic — always choose the harder right instead of the easier wrong — is the ethic that Bessent, Hassett, Chavez-DeRemer and Greer know nothing of — not to mention Trump himself.
That is why, dear reader, though I am a congenital optimist, for the first time I believe that if the behaviour that this administration has exhibited in just its first six months continues and is amplified for its full four years, the America you know will be gone. And I don't know how we will get it back. — The New York Times
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