The traditional Greek play “Antigone” by Sophocles warns that “nobody loves the messenger who brings dangerous information” and “no man delights within the bearer of dangerous information.”
About 1,900 years later, Lewis Carroll contributed one other spin on the ill-tempered response to disappointment with the Queen of Hearts in his 1865 basic Alice in Wonderland. “Off with their heads!” she would exclaim, at any time when a topic offered data that displeased her.
Within the twentieth century, George Orwell delivered one other model in his prescient masterwork 1984: “Each report has been destroyed or falsified, each e-book has been rewritten, each image has been repainted, each statue and avenue and constructing has been renamed, each date has been altered. And that course of is continuous day-to-day and minute by minute. Historical past has stopped. Nothing exists besides an infinite current during which the Occasion is at all times proper.”
And so we come to August 2025 and President Donald Trump’s disturbing dismissal of the Bureau of Labor Statistics Commissioner, Erika McEntarfer, instantly after the discharge of a destructive jobs report. On social media, Trump claimed with out proof that the commissioner “faked the Jobs Numbers.” He went on to say, “I’ve had points with the numbers for a very long time. We’re doing so nicely. I imagine the numbers had been phony like they had been earlier than the election, and there have been different occasions. So I fired her, and I did the appropriate factor.”
In brief, is that this Trump’s “Queen of Hearts” second, or one thing extra?
The Russian instance
It’s troublesome to look past Trump’s longstanding admiration of Russian President Vladimir Putin. As we’ve documented up to now, Putin has a historical past of rewriting inconvenient narratives. Rosstat, the nation’s official statistics company, has a longstanding report of manipulating financial information to please Putin. It goes to nice lengths to amend poor figures and conceal unflattering statistics beneath stress from the Kremlin, particularly since Putin’s Ukraine invasion in 2022. The Russian company has been “switching to new methodologies” and “recalculating information” with alarming frequency. Then there’s the overt political interference—Putin has fired the heads of Rosstat, transferred management of the company to political appointees, and appointed a blatant political choose as deputy financial minister.
It’s no marvel outdoors observers starting from worldwide organizations to international buyers repeatedly sound alarms over “considerations in regards to the reliability and consistency of the Kremlin’s financial releases.” Putin now refuses to reveal main financial indicators starting from international commerce information, month-to-month output information on oil and fuel, capital inflows and outflows, monetary statements of main corporations, central financial institution financial base information, international direct funding information, home worth added by business, and lending and mortgage origination information. Even Rosaviatsiya, Russia’s federal air transport company, has stopped publishing information on air passenger volumes.
But these are the main high-frequency circulate statistics that go into the development of an economy-wide GDP forecast for any nation—from the U.S. to China. Because the outbreak of struggle, the IMF has apparently allowed Russia to violate its membership requirements—which require member states to reveal clear, verifiable, and complete nationwide earnings statistics. Free markets can not perform with out trusted data. That’s why international direct funding into Russia has plummeted from over $100 billion to zero, and capital markets exercise has been nearly frozen over, with barely any IPOs and little international curiosity in Russian securities.
Not simply Russia
After all, China is little higher. Official Chinese language statistics have change into so widely known as manipulated and baseless that analysts depend on a variety of unofficial or proxy indicators to gauge the true state of the Chinese language financial system. These shadow measures span every thing from satellite tv for pc imagery to nightlife exercise to measuring air pollution out of smokestacks.
Even China’s high financial official, Premier Le Keqiang, secretly confided that he didn’t imagine the official GDP numbers, as a substitute preferring to observe rail freight volumes, electrical energy consumption, and financial institution loans disbursed.
Equally, in 2022, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan proceeded to fireside a sequence of senior financial officers who questioned his unconventional coverage of slicing rates of interest to battle inflation and spur an financial revival concurrently. Probably the most consequential motion by Erdoğan was his eventual removing of Sait Dincer, head of the Turkish Statistical Institute, after the bureau reported a surge in inflation of 36% year-over-year. The Royal Statistical Society and the American Statistical Affiliation collectively condemned the president’s “political interference within the manufacturing of official statistics,” urging him to permit the statistical institute “to provide goal statistical data,” an important perform “to make sure a wholesome democracy in Turkey and to take care of worldwide credibility in its statistics.”
In Venezuela, President Nicolas Maduro has reportedly detained over a dozen economists and consultants in current months in an try to suppress any strategies of a worsening monetary disaster in his nation.
Off along with her head!
However that is America, it’s alleged to be totally different. Trump’s abrupt firing of McEntarfer shocked market analysts and economists of all political backgrounds.
Most lately, on CNBC, Elaine Chao, a longtime Republican and former Trump cupboard official (she served as Labor Secretary for eight years beneath George W. Bush and served as transportation secretary in Trump’s first administration) instantly disputed the president’s accusations. Chao informed the viewers: “It is vitally, very troublesome to tamper or to intervene with these numbers. BLS may be very involved in regards to the safety of those numbers … if something had been to be awry … considered one of these 40 folks [conducting] the ultimate evaluation would have spoken up. So, it’s extremely unlikely.”
Former BLS Commissioner William Seashore, one other Trump appointee, posted on social media quickly after McEntarfer’s firing on Friday, calling it a “completely groundless” resolution that “units a harmful precedent and undermines the statistical mission of the Bureau.” Seashore additional criticized the president’s transfer on Sunday, saying his motion “undermines credibility” of the company.
Trump has a (small) level when he claims that BLS efficiency has been slipping. Issues in regards to the timeliness and accuracy of BLS information are longstanding, with main revisions occurring solely months later. The BLS and different statistical companies have acknowledged the necessity to modernize their methodology, however progress has been sluggish. After COVID-19 disruptions, the extent of job revisions has swung extra broadly than up to now, however makes an attempt to enhance their methodologies. The current downward revision on Friday, subtracting over 250,000 jobs, is the biggest because the peak of the pandemic.
Nevertheless, Trump’s accusations that the BLS faked job numbers to weaken his credibility and that of his Republican supporters spotlight his tendency to distort information. His apparently impulsive resolution to fireside McEntarfer, on a baseless perception that BLS revisions had been politically motivated, remembers so many literary depictions of authoritarianism.
Revisions are an ordinary a part of the BLS course of, important for bettering the accuracy of the U.S. financial system’s image as new information arrives. Since 2003, the common revision has been round 51,000 jobs, not an insignificant determine in its personal proper. Regardless of claims that will recommend in any other case, Trump’s tariff insurance policies have launched an unprecedented degree of uncertainty into the U.S. financial system—comparable solely to 2020—with many economists anticipating a recession as a consequence. Bloomberg has convincingly recommended a attainable hyperlink between the magnitude of destructive job revisions and recessionary circumstances.
Simply as main companies worldwide have labored to navigate the uncertainties brought on by the president’s financial insurance policies, ought to we anticipate totally different outcomes from a authorities company that has additionally confronted hiring restrictions and useful resource cuts attributable to arbitrary DOGE-led initiatives? Moreover, the Trump administration’s resolution to disband the Federal Statistics Advisory Committee in March eliminated an important mechanism for bettering company efficiency, together with the modernization of information assortment, tabulation, and evaluation. Whereas considerations about BLS strategies, such because the dependence on enumerators as a substitute of scanner information, are legitimate and benefit consideration, this isn’t the right solution to deal with them.
That is removed from the primary time Trump has subordinated statistical integrity to political theater. Different notorious examples embody how, after Trump mistakenly asserted there can be a “95% likelihood” that Hurricane Dorian would hit Alabama, he insisted on exhibiting doctored hurricane maps with a Sharpie-drawn observe over Alabama, in plain contradiction of NOAA forecasts. Or there was the time when Trump demanded Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger “discover me 11,000 votes”, insisting he received the 2020 presidential election and firing his personal deputies resembling Invoice Barr and Chris Krebs who refused to associate with his election denialism.
Extra lately, in April 2025, Trump introduced “reciprocal” tariffs on Liberation Day primarily based not on precise reciprocal commerce boundaries however slightly from a deceptive components primarily based on commerce deficits, main economists to declare Trump’s numbers had been “made-up” and “faulty.” Lastly, there was Trump’s routine inflation of the group measurement at his rallies, and calls for that his subordinates declare his first inauguration was essentially the most attended in historical past, contradicting factual information throughout Nielsen rankings, livestream numbers, and Metro ridership exhibiting far fewer attended his inauguration than Barack Obama’s inauguration, with Kellyanne Conway citing “different information.” Look to literature. Strongmen out of George Orwell or Lewis Carroll don’t hearth again with information; they hearth the truth-tellers.
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