Rash: Trump erodes trust by firing labor-data official

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“Memory hole” is one of the memorable phrases from “1984,” George Orwell’s seminal dystopian novel about authoritarianism that has stood the test of time (if not predicted modern times) since its publication 76 years ago. The term refers to a small chute leading to a big incinerator that burns information that needs to be erased from the public record.

On Friday, unable to use such subtleties, President Donald Trump used his own version of undoing unflattering data: He fired Erika McEntarfer, the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, after the monthly jobs report showed only 73,000 new jobs added last month and sharply curtailed initial estimates of robust growth in the previous two months.

Rather than reflect on employer uncertainty from policy prescriptions he’s implemented — such as tariffs, immigration enforcement or, as Stephan Miran, the chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, suggested on CNBC in the immediate wake of the report’s release, “quirks in the season adjustment process” — Trump took to social media to claim that the job numbers were “RIGGED in order to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad.”

The president predictably offered no evidence, because there is none, and instead said it was “my opinion.” The data, however, backed by numerous number crunchers, is not an opinion, and there’s nothing to suggest that McEntarfer, confirmed by the Senate by a bipartisan majority that included then-Sen. JD Vance, altered anything for political purposes.

Her firing isn’t just the latest partisan spat. Indeed, data is fundamental, foundational even, to nearly every public and private decisionmaking process, said University of Minnesota economics Prof. V.V. Chari.

“If you don’t have reliable data, all businesses are in the dark. The same thing goes for households: If you don’t have any reliable data about what the unemployment rate is, you will not know how difficult or easy it’s going to be for you to find a job if you quit the one that you are currently at. You will not know where to go, where to look if you don’t have reliable data, and governments will not be able to issue debt, because the people who are buying the debt will not know what the state of your economy is.”

Such was the case, Chari said, with Greece when it joined the European Union, which led “to a dramatic collapse in the ability of the Greeks to sell their bonds. It led to the great European financial crisis, which shook the world.” Indeed, in cases like Greece and other basket-case countries that proved the perils of economic mendacity, “really catastrophic, really terrible things can and have happened.”

Firing the labor statistician delivering the data is akin to breaking the thermometer because of a heat wave. Which, in a sense, is what the administration is also doing regarding global warming by proposing to revoke the endangerment finding, which since 2009 has been the legal basis to address climate change. The revocation is being led by the Environmental Protection Agency, whose name now evokes another Orwellian phrase: double-think.

“Alternative facts” was the term of art in the first Trump administration, when then counselor to the President Kellyanne Conway used it in context of Press Secretary Sean Spicer’s insistence that inauguration crowds were much larger than they actually were. It didn’t stop there, despite two impeachments (regardless of what the Smithsonian may say, as it recently removed references to that fact only to announce a backtrack after a furor). It has continued on multiple fronts, including (but certainly not limited to) the 2020 election and this year’s Big Beautiful Bill, for which the administration disputed deficit data from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.

This latest episode was “a sad and tragic day,” said Chari. “This was a country, until last Friday, which consistently provided the highest-quality statistics in difficult times. This firing signals to me that we are well on our way to becoming a country where the government is not to be trusted, statistics are not to be trusted, nobody is to be trusted.”

In data that is verifiable, Publisher’s Weekly reported that during inauguration week last January, sales of “1984” increased 192%, putting it 10th on that week’s bestseller list, while another Orwellian warning, “Animal Farm,” rose 136%. In fact, five dystopian tomes identified by Publisher’s Weekly soared. The spikes in sales wasn’t driven by marketing, Signet associate publisher Craig Burke told the magazine, but were the result of “readers turning to Orwell’s classic novels to better understand current events.”

The current event Chari fears? “We are becoming a dictatorship in mighty quick time.”