In Trump world, you shoot the messenger and make it clear bad news gets you fired
WASHINGTON DC – Donald Trump has a new past-time: shooting the messenger.
The US President’s hasty decision last Friday to fire Erika McEntarfer from her job running the country’s Bureau of Labour Statistics came just hours after the government agency delivered some very unwelcome news. In its much-anticipated monthly bulletin, the bureau reported that the country had only created 70,000 new jobs in July, not the 100,000 that Trump had expected.
In any other US administration, the President would have taken that news on the chin, issued a statement ensuring the nation that his policies were nonetheless on the right track, and engaged in meetings behind the scenes to discuss whether any changes were warranted.
In Trump’s world, you shoot the messenger, and make it clear to scores of other federal government bureaucrats toiling on data research that if they deliver unwelcome news to the White House, their jobs, too, could be on the line.
Worse than that, you also ascribe political motives to the messenger that are entirely unsupported by the facts, and threaten to turn the country into a global laughing stock.
Trump claims that McEntarfer, a Biden appointee approved by the US Senate in a wholly bipartisan vote in January 2024, is a political hack who fabricated the monthly jobs report on several occasions. “Last week’s Job’s Report [sic] was RIGGED, just like the numbers prior to the Presidential Election were Rigged”, the President fumed on Sunday night. “In both cases, there was massive, record setting revisions, in favor of the Radical Left Democrats”, he wrote on his Truth Social account.
As the whole of Washington and the rest of the world knows, there is zero evidence to support the claim that McEntarfer rigged anything. The Bureau did revise numbers that it published in May and June – a commonplace occurrence that takes place routinely when some of the 629,000 worksites monitored by the Bureau submit their monthly reports to the agency late. Based on those delayed numbers, the Bureau downgraded the number of jobs the country created in May and June by 258,000, which is certainly a substantial revision. But there is no indication that – as Trump claims – McEntarfer “CONCOCTED” the data “to make a great Republican Success look less stellar!!!”
Critics contend that Trump’s actions threaten to make the US government’s economic data – once considered unimpeachable internationally – less reliable and more of a political football. Every single data-gathering bureaucrat is now on notice that bad news is an unwelcome commodity in Trump’s White House. No agency is likely to be immune from his antipathy. Earlier this year, Trump criticised the non-political Congressional Budget Office (CBO) for concluding that his “Big, Beautiful Bill” on tax and spending would swell the deficit by $3.4 trillion. The CBO, established in 1974 to provide objective, nonpartisan information to support lawmakers as they make decisions about proposed legislation, seems very old-school in Trump’s brave new world.
The Federal Reserve bank chairman Jerome Powell is another figure relentlessly targeted by Trump for criticism. Trump is furious that the Fed, created as a politically independent central bank, has not yet cut American interest rates. He continually refers to the chairman by the moniker “Too Late Powell”, and calls him a “stubborn MORON”. But Powell, named “Central Banker of the Year” in January by The Banker magazine, has secured global praise for his steady stewardship of America’s economic recovery, and last month Trump’s mere threat to fire him sent global markets into a tailspin.
Now Trump has a chance to engage in fresh antics that pressure Powell, after the weekend resignation of Adriana Kugler, one of seven members of the Federal Reserve’s board of governors. Kugler’s term was due to expire next January, but her early departure affords the White House a chance to replace her with Powell’s potential successor, making life for the Fed chair even more uncomfortable.
Meanwhile, in the Lone Star State of Texas, politics over the weekend resembled a “Carry On” film farce. Democrat lawmakers fled the state, in an effort to block Republicans from advancing efforts to engage in “redistricting” – the drawing of new constituency boundaries – that look likely to deliver Trump’s party five additional seats in the House of Representatives in next year’s mid-term elections.
Sixty-two Democrats boarded planes and flew to New York, Chicago and Boston in order to deny the legislature a quorum. Representative Gene Wu, the Texas Democrats’ chair, accused the Republicans of “using an intentionally racist map to steal the voices of millions of Black and Latino Texans”. Texas Governor Greg Abbot, a close ally of Trump, says he will take steps to remove the Democrats from office unless they return to the state.
Across the board, the self-proclaimed “cradle of democracy” is in trouble. The world can only watch with wonderment and consternation.
