The BLS is not a nest of partisans.

Readers, the Trump Era began nearly a decade ago this summer, and it’s been a long ten years since then. At this point, we’re all battle-scarred veterans inured to the madness of the daily meat-grinder, as we gaze off into the horizon with thousand-yard stares. What’s that you say? Trump’s national security team is accidentally inviting their journalistic arch-enemy to war planning sessions? People have already forgotten. Is Donald Trump accepting a personal gift plane from Qatar? Just another day in paradise.

But let’s not move on too quickly from how banana-republic clownshoes it is that the president of the United States just fired the Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics for reporting politically unfortunate labor statistics. Yes, the recent jobs report was a bomb for the administration — only 73,000 jobs added — but even worse, the previous two jobs reports were revised downward significantly, revealing an economy that has, in fact, been alarmingly anemic ever since Trump announced his tariff regime. Trump responded by firing Commissioner Erika McEntarfer (via Truth Social, naturally) and ranting that Jerome Powell should also go, for not cutting interest rates as Trump has demanded he do.

It is disgraceful, yes, but beyond that, it is pointless — you can fire a commissioner, but you cannot fire the economy. The editors of NR said almost everything about this that needs to be said, so I will only hit the basic beats.

The BLS is not a nest of partisans and never has been; it is a bureau full of data nerds whose ability to measure economic data at the first impression (as opposed to retrospective revision) has been utterly crippled in recent years by the post-Covid plummet in household response rates to its surveys. Does the BLS need to figure out a better way to gather data in the modern age? Without a doubt. Is there any partisan valence to this issue whatsoever? Absolutely not.

Trump is frustrated at the prospect of impending economic humiliation — who would have ever thought a draconian international tariff regime could harm Main Street’s economy? — and he is lashing out. If he undermines Americans’ confidence in our government’s ability to neutrally gather objective economic data, then all the more the better for him. He benefits from a world where anything and everything is interpreted through the lens of vulgar partisanship, so that he and his most devoted followers can have a story to tell themselves. (“The economy is good — they are trying to lie to you about it with their fake numbers!”)

And on some level, that is what this is all about: Trump legitimately believes he can threaten economic bad news out of existence: “If they don’t report it, nobody will actually feel it!” It’s a deranged view, but natural for a media figure like Trump to believe — throughout his entire life, he has operated on the premise that the media shapes reality if not creates it outright, crafting a narrative message that the masses lap up like slop. Actual reality? That has always mattered less to Trump than perceptions of it.

This compulsive media-focused need to “manage the narrative” — for example, his inability to ever publicly concede loss on any issue — has been a recognizable thread throughout his entire career, one he learned from his mentor Roy Cohn. (For one thing, it explains his lifelong eagerness to sue media outlets and bring them to heel.) It also reminds me an awful lot of Democrats during the Biden era, who believed that if they worked the media refs into not talking about inflation or commenting about Joe Biden’s visible slide into senility that the voters would not notice these things either. No matter what he orders the new commissioner of the BLS to say in order to keep his job, I predict that Donald Trump will have similar success in talking Americans out of the reality of an economic downturn, if and when it should come.