Donald Trump’s War With Numbers

WASHINGTON — Donald Trump has a simple solution when numbers are telling him something he does not want to hear: Make up new numbers.

The president’s strategy, if you want to call it one, was on vivid display this week on three fronts: His decision to appoint a conservative crony to an essential federal agency charged with compiling the monthly unemployment numbers, his decision to declare an emergency in Washington, D.C., while dismissing data showing crime in the city is in decline and at decades-long lows, and his demand for a new and likely unconstitutional census which would exclude undocumented immigrants.

In general, when Trump is in power, he likes to paint a rosy picture of an America where everything is going as right as it can be. When he’s out of office, Trump makes wildly false claims about the national unemployment rate and the crime rate to attack Democrats. During his 2016 presidential campaign, for example, Trump claimed the unemployment rate was as high as 42%, even though it was about 5% at the time.

But after a government report suggested the labor market is cooling off in his second term, Trump appears to be gearing up to muzzle or manipulate the Bureau of Labor Statistics, firing its respected leader and announcing plans to replace her with a partisan nominee who suggested getting rid of monthly jobs reports entirely. And that’s after the unemployment rate had only gone up a tenth of a percentage point.

At the same time, Trump is deploying National Guard troops to patrol the streets of the capital, despite figures that Trump’s own Department of Justice has touted showing a drop in crime there. He’s pressured Goldman Sachs to replace its chief economist after it warned that American consumers will pay for a large share of Trump’s tariffs, and he’s shut down government data collection that helps inform policymakers, including at the Environmental Protection Agency and NASA.

Experts say Trump’s moves smack of authoritarianism seen in other countries.

“It’s part of what scholars would call the authoritarian playbook – undermining factual information and falsifying things that you know to be true,” Natalie Koch, a Syracuse University professor who researches authoritarianism, told HuffPost.

Koch has studied personality cults and said that when Trump does something like baselessly claiming the jobs numbers are “rigged,” the statement itself is a flex.

“These kinds of really, really brazen lies … serve more of that sort of purpose of demonstrating power and the ability to just bend people,” Koch said.

Monthly jobs numbers are compiled from surveys of thousands of businesses and government agencies. The method isn’t perfect and doesn’t include every business, which would be costly and impractical. The reports are often revised upward or downward later, when more information becomes available. Trump’s allies have pointed to declining survey response rates as a reason for the supposed unreliability of the jobs numbers, but have shown no willingness to actually address the problem, which has broadly confounded researchers and would likely cost money to solve.

“You would have to certainly pay more for the program in the short run, because you have to do all the research behind redesigning the system. And do the statistical agencies want to do this? Yes, but there has been no funding for additional programs at the BLS for 15 years,” Erica Groshen, who served as BLS commissioner from 2013 to 2017, said in an interview.

Trump is upset that the previous two months of job growth during his presidency were revised downward in the jobs report for July. He nominated Heritage Foundation economist E.J. Antoni, a BLS critic, to lead the agency going forward, a selection that has alarmed both conservative and liberal economic experts.

Democrats are warning that Antoni’s confirmation could even lead the government to fly blind straight into a recession.

“E.J. Antoni is an unqualified right-wing extremist who won’t think twice about manipulating BLS data and degrading the credibility of the agency to make Trump happy—and has already suggested shelving important data entirely,” Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) said in a statement. “Putting him in charge of the BLS is a dangerous move that puts nonpartisan economic data—and by extension, our entire economy—plainly at risk.”

It’s unclear if Antoni will have enough Republican support in the Senate to be confirmed as BLS chair. But Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), who leads the Senate committee with jurisdiction over his nomination, said Tuesday he agreed with Trump that the agency needs to produce “unbiased” economic information.

Trump is making similar efforts to wave off data on falling crime in Washington. Speaking with reporters at the Kennedy Center on Wednesday, Trump urged the city to release “real” statistics on violent crime in the district. The city has reported that violent crime fell 35% last year and 24% so far this year. The D.C. police union has accused the city’s police department of misclassifying crimes to create a false appearance of improvement, but the city’s numbers track with similar trends in other big cities.

“The whole thing is a rigged deal,” Trump said. “They said it’s the best in 20 years. No, it’s the worst in 20 years.”

White House adviser Stephen Miller went further in a post online: “Crime stats in big blue cities are fake. The real rates of crime, chaos & dysfunction are orders of magnitude higher,” he wrote. “Everyone who lives in these areas knows this. They program their entire lives around it.”

Crime in Washington, while still higher than in some other cities around the U.S., is at a 30-year low. It did spike badly in the aftermath of the coronavirus pandemic, but it has since come down, as one of Trump’s top MAGA enforcers acknowledged a few months ago.

“Thanks to the leadership of President Trump and the efforts of our ‘Make D.C. Safe Again’ initiative, the District has seen a significant decline in violent crime,” former interim U.S. Attorney Ed Martin wrote in an April press release that’s still live on the DOJ’s website. “We are proving that strong enforcement and smart policies can make our communities safer.”

Last week, Trump announced he’d ordered the Commerce Department to conduct a new census, one excluding undocumented immigrants. It’s an incredibly important survey for understanding the country’s demographics and apportioning its political representation.

“People who are in our Country illegally WILL NOT BE COUNTED IN THE CENSUS,” the president wrote on social media.

Trump’s directive is contrary to the Constitution, which calls for a census every 10 years — the next one’s supposed to be in 2030 — and says the government should count everybody.

Trump hopes a quick and partial count could help his party in next year’s midterm elections. If Democrats retake the House, an outcome many analysts consider likely, then the administration will have to deal with subpoenas, and Trump could face impeachment.

Koch, the authoritarianism scholar, told HuffPost that Trump has been nothing if not consistent.

“I’ve been thinking about the fact Trump said he would only be a dictator on the first day,” Koch said. “And what we have seen so far is that he’s been a dictator for the last seven months.”