What did Donald Trump do today?

He fired the person who brought him bad news about the effect of his choices on the economy.

There was absolutely terrible jobs news today: not only did the country barely add any jobs in July, but the initial projections for May and June were much too high. In other words, the United States is now in the third month of an abrupt labor slump that started almost exactly when American businesses started having to deal with the fallout from Trump's trade war.

 

Trump's response was to fire the head of the bureau that generates those statistics, Erika McEntarfer, and claim that she was a Biden appointee and therefore out to get him with "RIGGED" numbers.

The kind of manipulation Trump is imagining would be impossible to do. The data gathered by the federal government related to the economy come from a wide variety of different sources outside of the government itself and is plugged into publicly available formulas to generate the top-line numbers. Tampering with all of these numbers at the source would be impossible, and changing them after the fact would be easy to detect.

But there is another way that a malicious actor could undermine confidence in the federal government's economic statistics—that is, besides simply declaring that the numbers were "RIGGED" like Trump did and hoping people believed him. If the government collected less information, and had fewer staff to process and report on what they did collect, then the results it generated would become less certain and easier to manipulate. (That's especially true if the president publicly fired anyone who brought him numbers he didn't like.)

Trump ordered the Bureau of Labor Statistics to radically scale back its data collection relating to inflation and unemployment almost immediately after taking office. He also disbanded an expert advisory committee on economic statistics, and ordered changes to how key financial indices like the Consumer Price Index were calculated.

Trump knows a thing or two about fudging numbers, even ignoring the fact that he was convicted of 34 felony counts related to faking the numbers in his business records to cheat banks and evade taxes. He campaigned in 2016 on the lie that the Obama administration was concealing 42% unemployment—meaning that about twice as many people were unemployed as during the Great Depression, and only he had noticed. After he took office and the first monthly jobs report showed that he had inherited Obama's excellent numbers, he claimed that they had suddenly become real.

Why does this matter?

• If you wanted to sabotage the American economy once and for all, you'd make sure nobody could trust anything the American government said about it.

• Convicted felons who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones. 

• Killing the messenger who dares to bring you bad news is what dictators do.