A Saddam-Style Response to a Bad Jobs Report
In firing the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Trump undermines a core strength of America’s free society.
Dictators don’t like getting bad news. There’s evidence that as late as March 2003, Saddam Hussein genuinely believed that his regime would withstand the overwhelming strength of the Anglo-American coalition that invaded Iraq. Saddam’s information minister, nicknamed “Baghdad Bob,” denied that the enemy was inside of the Iraqi capital well after US troops had breached the city. When he was finally forced to concede that point, the propagandist confidently asserted, Emperor Palpatine-style, that everything was going according to plan.
The rest of the world must have found some macabre comedy in those ridiculous pronouncements. Inside the Iraqi presidential compound, however, that kind of talk was the gospel truth. Anyone with misgivings kept their second-guessing private. They might have recalled how an unfortunate health minister ended his life in multiple pieces after offering Saddam candid feedback during the 1980s Iran-Iraq War.
Last week, President Donald Trump fired Erika McEntarfer, the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, after the agency turned around a jobs report that didn’t match the White House’s rosy self-image.
Someone more subtle might have tried to pass off the timing of McEntarfer’s dismissal as a coincidence. But Trump, being Trump, took to Truth Social to insist that the latest employment statistics were “RIGGED;” a matter of “FAKE political numbers.” McEntarfer, a non-partisan bureaucrat and hardly a household name, was suddenly the latest enemy of the state.
The president’s inner circle quickly closed ranks. National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett, doing his best Baghdad Bob impression, said the whole affair was simply a matter of getting “highly-qualified people” into the Bureau of Labor Statistics to look at the data with “a fresh set of eyes.”
McEntarfer is not going to meet the graphic end that those who speak up under real dictatorships often do. However, the threat of being fired may be incentive enough for people to start massaging the contents of documents on their way to the Oval Office. Today, it’s a disappointing jobs report. Tomorrow, it’ll be something more severe. What kinds of information will the “highly-qualified people” surrounding the president produce when America faces a real crisis—a pandemic, war, a hurricane, or a crippling terrorist attack?
One of democracy’s key advantages over dictatorship is that the professionals are able to do their jobs without fear of retaliation. Elected officials, chosen by the people, have the final say on policy, not appointed bureaucrats. But the statisticians and intelligence analysts and military officers can’t be summarily dismissed for sharing forecasts that politicians don’t like.
The system isn’t perfect, but, on balance, it means that leaders in the Free World have access to better information than their authoritarian counterparts.
Democrats on Capitol Hill jumped to call the president out for firing McEntarfer. Even a handful of Republican senators seemed to recognize, belatedly, what’s at stake here. Yet words are cheap. Members of both parties need to reinforce protections for civil servants. They need to fight McEntarfer’s removal, which should not be treated as a fait accompli. America has historically boasted a democratic competitive advantage over its authoritarian adversaries. Only vigilance and constant improvement can keep that edge sharp.
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America is built on balance of power between three branches and relies on human decency, and a general consensus to respect rule of law for enforcement of these powers. But as the past six months have shown, America has no way to actually stop the abuses by today's White House/Executive Branch, cowed judiciary and spineless legislators. Once decency and respect are no longer brakes, we got nada. The USSR basically slid into non-existence after the death of Brezhnev - for a variety of political and economic reasons all rooted in one cause - the inablity to stop the slide. Some sort of democracy will be around for the next generation here in America, but not the genuinely robust one that I experienced for most of my 70 years. In December 1984, still unclear to me how it happened, excerpts of Gorbachev's Dec. 10 speech before the Supreme Soviet was made available to Western viewers - I'm thinking via BBC - which was a first. After I listened, I called my father, who was also listening, immediately and said, "that's it. the beginning of the final end. the soviet union is over. i'm going with ten years (Dec 1991 was seven)." A refugee from soviet occupaiton of eastern europe, an avowed anti-communist, my father nonetheless emitted a dry laugh of disbelief and told me to hold my horses. I write all this only to say that the past six months, actually by May, within first three months of Trump, I had the exact same intuition, the same feeling as I did in December 1984. Except then I reacted with glee, this time with sadness and dread. The arbitrary destruction of the federal infrastructure that served the people, the barely disguised desire to turn over governance almost completely to a wealthy elite - preferably the techno elitie - the willingness by major institutions/organizations/corporations to just cave to just the threat of damage - the petty retribution - the blatant use of the public office for personal gain with barely a "whoa!" - this time the horse has left the gate.
Robert Anton Wilson used to call this the Snafu principle. “A man with a gun is told only that which people assume will not provoke him to pull the trigger.”