Trump’s war against numbers
This is not governance. It’s improv comedy performed by a man with subpoena immunity and a marker fetish.
There was a time—long ago, when the Earth was cooling and economists still wore bow ties unironically—when the Bureau of Labor Statistics toiled quietly in the chiaroscuro shadows of the federal government. Its work was noble, if not exactly thrilling: compiling payroll data, calculating unemployment, and generally avoiding the attention of functionaries with a security detail. Then came Donald Trump. And with him, the dawning realization that no institution, no matter how innocuous or arithmetically circumscribed, would be spared the radiant bonfire of his grievances. So, a new war against an abstraction, numbers, has emerged similar to other unending and unwinnable wars: drugs and terrorism.
On August 1, Erika McEntarfer, a mild-mannered economist whose most controversial act prior to this week was probably mislabeling a Y axis in a graph, was fired as Commissioner of the BLS. Her crime? Reporting a disappointing 73,000 new jobs in July, less 258,000 quietly erased from May and June thanks to meddling “revisions.” In the great tradition of authoritarian micromanagement and reality TV plot twists, Trump accused her of “rigging” the numbers—without evidence, without hesitation, and certainly without reading the footnotes.
“She’s been cooking the books for Biden!” Trump thundered from the golf cart of autocracy. Never mind that McEntarfer was the kind of technocrat who probably alphabetizes her cereal boxes and cross-checks them with census data. Or that labor revisions happen every month. Or that the BLS couldn’t rig a Monopoly game even if it tried. What mattered was that the numbers had upset the Supreme Leader’s gut feeling, which has become the Republicans’ most revered barometer.
It’s not the first time Trump has turned numbers into enemies of the state. Remember when he insisted that Hurricane Dorian would hit Alabama, and when it didn’t, he simply whipped out a Sharpie and redrew the storm’s path? It was the presidential equivalent of failing a spelling test and stabbing the dictionary. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, whose job is to track weather and not presidential mood swings, was coerced into backing him up. Meteorologists have yet to recover from the humiliation.
Or consider the tragicomic episode of Hurricane Maria, when independent studies estimated around 3,000 deaths in Puerto Rico. Trump called the numbers fake, an “invention” by Democrats. One assumes the deceased were unavailable for comment. And of course, there was COVID, the virus that magically disappeared every Easter, or maybe just after the election—depending on which rally you attended. Trump declared it less deadly than the flu, even as refrigerated trucks idled behind hospitals, and intoned, “We tested bleach. I can tell you that [drinking] bleach will kill the virus in five minutes.” A clearly stunned Dr. Deborah Birx, Trump’s coronavirus response coordinator, sat silently off to the side as the president made this suggestion to her and other scientists. Later, she would tell ABC, “I didn’t know how to handle that episode,” adding, “I still think about it every day.”
Then, back in the prelapsarian days of 2016, Candidate Trump declared that the unemployment rate was a hoax, possibly dreamed up by Chinese statisticians working out of a Brooklyn pizza parlor where Hillary Clinton and her top aides were involved in various crimes such as running a child-trafficking ring. But after his inauguration, he experienced a Damascene conversion: suddenly, the very same statistics became glorious proof of American greatness. The numbers had been healed, redeemed by his touch, like spreadsheets at a tent revival.
Now, in his second term—a fever dream from which the MAGA republic may or may not awaken—the President has returned to familiar terrain. Only this time, it’s not enough to gaslight with numbers. Now he must banish them. Or, more precisely, fire the humans unlucky enough to assemble them. The McEntarfers of the world, toiling in fluorescent anonymity, have learned that there’s no data so clean it can’t be accused of disloyalty.
The consequences are, as the economists might say, nontrivial. Investors rely on this data. Businesses make hiring decisions. The Fed twitches at every decimal point. But those are trifles in the face of Trump’s greater goal: to establish a new metric of truth. Not one based on evidence and verification, but on vibes. Presidential vibes. The truth is whatever the President tweeted last, and the lie is whatever makes him look bad.
This is not governance. It’s improv comedy performed by a man with subpoena immunity and a marker fetish. The audience is captive. The victims are jobs reports, professional bureaucrats, and normal markers, including consensual reality.
And so McEntarfer exits the stage, dispatched by the ineffable hand of autocratic whimsy. Her spreadsheets, undoubtedly color-coded and peer-reviewed, will now gather dust in the National Archives, alongside the Constitution and other documents no longer in regular use. The BLS, meanwhile, will continue crunching numbers—until someone decides that numbers favor cancel culture, or that decimal points have a liberal bias.
In Trump’s America, the map is not the territory. The map is whatever shape the Sharpie says it is. What will happen if one day it says that the Earth is flat?
