Commentary by Heather Cox Richardson
President Donald J. Trump’s firing of the commissioner of labor statistics on Friday for announcing that job growth has slowed dramatically has drawn a level of attention to Trump’s assault on democracy that other firings have not. Famously, authoritarian governments make up statistics to claim their policies are working well, even when they quite obviously are not.
Yesterday former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers told George Stephanopoulos of This Week on ABC News: “This is the stuff of democracies giving way to authoritarianism…. [F]iring statisticians goes with threatening the heads of newspapers. It goes with launching assaults on universities. It goes with launching assaults on law firms that defend clients that the elected boss finds uncongenial. This is really scary stuff.” In The Bulwark, Bill Kristol called out the open assault “on the truth, on the rule of law, on a free society” as “part of the broader pattern of the transformation of government information into pure propaganda.”
Summers shot down Trump’s claim that the commissioner had rigged the numbers in the jobs report to make him look bad. “These numbers are put together by teams of literally hundreds of people following detailed procedures that are in manuals,” he said. “There’s no conceivable way that the head of the [Bureau of Labor Statistics] could have manipulated this number.”
Kathryn Anne Edwards at Bloomberg explained the implications of Trump’s determination to control economic statistics: “The peril…isn’t a potential recession; it’s losing highly reliable, accurate and transparent data on the health of the world’s largest economy.” As Ben Casselman pointed out in the New York Times, officials at the Federal Reserve, for example, need reliable statistics on inflation and unemployment to inform decisions about interest rates, which in turn affect how much Americans pay for car loans and mortgages.
Economist Paul Krugman noted that Trump lashed out against the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics because most economists warned that Trump’s economic policies would hurt the economy, and the official data is starting to confirm that he was wrong and they were right. Krugman suggested that those numbers will continue to get worse as Trump’s tariffs and deportations start to show up in inflation.
An Associated Press/ NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll released today shows that 86% of American adults report that the cost of groceries is a source of stress, with 53% saying it causes “major” stress. Only 14% of adults say the cost of groceries is not a source of stress for them.
On all his key issues Trump is currently underwater—meaning that more people disapprove of his handling of them than approve—and reports that he is abandoning his campaign promise to require healthcare insurance companies to pay for in vitro fertilization, or IVF, will not endear him to those voters, either. Krugman notes that as Trump’s popularity is disintegrating, he appears to be ramping up his attempts to destroy American democracy.
At the same time, the administration continues to reel under pressure over the files related to the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Trump’s inability to let the issue drop is keeping it very much alive. On Sunday the president railed against radio host Charlamagne Tha God for saying that the administration’s poor handling of the Epstein issue created an opportunity for traditional Republicans to take their party back.
As more information emerges about Trump’s association with Epstein, Trump and his loyalists are trying hard to push stories suggesting that former secretary of state Hillary Clinton or former president Barack Obama or other Democrats are the real criminals.
On July 24, director of national intelligence Tulsi Gabbard claimed that officials in the administration of Barack Obama ”manufactured” evidence in 2016 to suggest that Trump’s campaign was connected to Russian operatives. This was ridiculous on its face, but then the administration declassified documents it claimed proved their allegations. But another set of documents released on August 1 said the two emails that purportedly proved such a plan were instead, as Charlie Savage of the New York Times put it, “most likely manufactured by Russian spies.”
After Gabbard made her claims, media outlets reported that Attorney General Pam Bondi was surprised as well as annoyed by Gabbard’s explosive accusations and, already in trouble for botching the Epstein issue, scrambled to support them.
Today Sadie Gurman, Josh Dawsey, and Brett Forrest of the Wall Street Journal reported that, according to an official at the Department of Justice, Bondi has signed an order directing a U.S. attorney to present evidence concerning the matter to a grand jury. This is a major escalation in their crusade to convince voters that the real story in the news should be that Trump is a victim.
The Wall Street Journal reporters note that the administration’s claims “come as the Trump administration has faced intense bipartisan criticism over its refusal to provide more information about the FBI investigation into convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.”
Another aspect of the Epstein issue is also in the news today. After the Wall Street Journal published the story by Khadeeja Safdar and Joe Palazzolo reporting that Trump contributed a bawdy birthday letter to an album Epstein’s associate Ghislaine Maxwell compiled for Epstein’s fiftieth birthday in 2003, Trump sued the Wall Street Journal’s parent company Dow Jones and owner Rupert Murdoch for $10 billion. But the lawsuit read as if it were written primarily to rile up Trump’s base. The Wall Street Journal stood firm on the accuracy of its reporting, and the defendants moved to dismiss the lawsuit.
Then Trump asked a federal judge in Miami to force Murdoch to answer questions under oath within 15 days, and that, too, sounded like an attempt to display dominance. The request stressed Murdoch’s age and ill health as a reason for the request. “Murdoch is 94 years old, has suffered from multiple health issues throughout his life, is believed to have suffered recent significant health scares, and is presumed to live in New York, New York,” all making him unlikely to be able to testify at a trial, the filing read.
Today Trump quietly backed away from his demand for Murdoch’s deposition, and both sides put off discovery—the process of disclosing information and evidence to the other party—at least until after the motion to dismiss has been decided.
Trump’s former lawyer Todd Blanche, now deputy attorney general at the Department of Justice, has met twice with Maxwell, who says she will “testify openly and honestly” before Congress about Epstein if she gets a pardon. She is currently serving a twenty-year sentence for sex trafficking and other charges. Today Alexander Bolton of The Hill said Republican senators are warning Trump and Bondi that they should consider very carefully whether it would be a good idea to grant Maxwell a pardon.
Also today, Casey Gannon of CNN reported that two of Epstein’s victims have filed letters with the court expressing outrage at the Justice Department’s handling of the Epstein files, suggesting that the department was protecting wealthy men at the expense of the victims.
