Yet Another Trump Fiasco

Firing the messenger. Plus the links.

A few short notes on the catastrophic decision Donald Trump made on Friday to deal with bad economic numbers by firing the top person at the Bureau of Labor Statistics:

• Trump is not the first president to mess with BLS. Richard Nixon decided that Jews were out to get him…and had his underlings draw up a list of Jews at BLS and then demote them. As I said a while ago, pick a past presidential scandal and odds are Trump has topped it; in this case, Nixon didn’t publicly undermine the entire agency. Also, unlike Trump, Nixon used antisemitic slurs only in private (as far as I know), so no one found out until the White House tapes revealed them.

• Speaking of Nixon…one big difference between Trump and other presidents who have tried to force unconstitutional and illegal acts is that Trump does it in public, all the time. Oddly enough, this does have one advantage: It’s harder for people such as White House staffers and executive branch bureaucrats and political appointees to ignore such directives when they’re public.

• On the other hand, it’s likely that constantly, publicly ignoring the rule of law is part of the reason Trump has always been, and remains, unusually unpopular.

• Trump may have been trying to affect public opinion by trying to create doubt about the jobs numbers. If so, it is an incredibly stupid strategy, poorly executed. By doing it right after a bad jobs report, it made Trump look like a sore loser lashing out — and it had the very predictable effect of magnifying the jobs story and elongating the news cycle about it while convincing absolutely no one.

• (Yes, Trump’s strongest supporters will no doubt believe his obvious lie that the jobs numbers were phony…but they were going to believe whatever he said, so that doesn’t count).

• More likely? Trump isn’t trying to keep the truth away from voters; he’s trying to keep it away from himself. As I’ve said, the second Trump presidency seems to be set up to prevent the president from ever having to confront information that challenges his impulses and prejudices. No one is going to tell him that he’s slashing Medicaid, or who pays tariffs, or that he still doesn’t understand NATO finances (or dozens of other fundamental facts).

• Yes, that’s an incredibly incompetent and dangerous way of running the presidency.

• No, I don’t know whether White House Chief of Staff Susie Whiles is consciously trying to keep Trump comfortably ignorant…I have no idea what she thinks her job is.

• And this is admittedly speculative, but: I strongly suspect that Trump (erroneously, of course) sincerely believes that the jobs numbers are rigged, because I think Trump just assumes that nothing at all is on the up-and-up. I don’t think he can conceive of a person or an organization that honestly tries to follow professional standards. (Yes, those standards or other “neutral” criteria are inevitably their own form of bias, in a way. But that doesn’t make them phony!)

• (This apparent Trump assumption is related to his similar apparent belief that no one other than total losers is motivated by anything other than the crassest self-interest. I think his puzzlement over e.g. military service is absolutely sincere, and absolutely bonkers.)

• Donald Trump is very, very, very, very, very bad at his job.

How about some links:

1. Adam Bonica on Democratic fundraising.

2. Lindsey Cormack on the use of “Nazi” in congressional newsletters. Fascinating.

3. Eric Gonzalez Juenke at Good Authority on consequences of immigration policy.

4. Dalia Dassa Kaye on what Israel got wrong on Iran.

5. Miranda Yaver on the attack on Medicaid.

6. Seth Masket on the attack on higher education.

7. Jennifer Victor at Mischiefs of Faction on the attack on George Mason U.

8. Matthew Shugart on authoritarianism in El Salvador.

9. And, yes, I recognize everything that Dan Drezner says here.