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.