Today, my newsfeed had a Reuters headline “White House defends firing of labor official as critics warn of trust erosion.” The story concerns Trump’s firing of the Bureau of Labor Statistics head, Erika McEntarfer, for issuing jobs numbers that Trump didn’t like.
The press has reported this unprecedented reprisal for honestly reporting crappy job numbers as a case of “killing the messenger.” News stories also have included interviews and analyses emphasizing the importance of accurate economic data and the dangers of politicizing government data collection and reporting.
But this isn’t a case of “killing the messenger,” because it isn’t really about trying to censor bad economic news. Instead, Trump is eliminating an impediment (in the person of Ms. McEntarfer) to his political manipulation of government data. We’ll see similar political manipulation of data in government reports about other economic data, such as the impact of tariffs on prices, and in reports about non-economic issues such as vaccine effectiveness, weather, Medicaid enrollment, and global warming. For Trump and company, facts are and always will be a threat.
As for the critics’ “warn[ing] of trust erosion,” Trump and company most likely don’t see that as a threat at all. In fact, the erosion of public trust in government data is the goal of Trump’s actions. Trump’s critics–at least in their public statements–simply have not come to grips with the simple facts that Trump wants to sow chaos and division, and he wants to break things, especially things that have any source of authority that isn’t named “Donald J. Trump.”
So when the press and critics “warn” Trump and his minions that people may start to distrust government statistics, his reaction is likely to be “Good. That’s the goal.”