During the COVID pandemic, Donald Trump said many unforgettable things. Perhaps his most memorable line came during his daily press “briefing,” during which he quizzed one of the scientists who had told him that household disinfectant could kill the virus on surfaces, saying he could “see the disinfectant, where it knocks it out in a minute. One minute. And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning?”
It shouldn’t surprise us that the man who thought that not testing people in a global pandemic would make the virus disappear would also manipulate numbers to make his daft policies look more successful.
It was absurd, needless to say, and caused a nationwide frenzy, including many hilarious comedic takes. He abandoned the briefings after that, finally taking his advisers’ advice that they were hurting his re-election campaign. (They were also hurting the country, which was terrified that such a ridiculous figure was in charge during a global health emergency.)
But perhaps the most disturbing Trump line, which he repeated endlessly, was “if you don’t test, you don’t have any cases. If we stopped testing right now, we’d have very few cases, if any.” He apparently issued directives to that end as well:
He told the press that he was dead serious about this numerous times, as his staff scrambled to try to clean it up for him.
Whether he actually thought there was logic to what he was saying is unknown, but we do know that he had a political motive for saying this. As the Wall St. Journal reported at the time:
Mr. Trump said testing for Covid-19 was overrated and allowed for the possibility that some Americans wore facial coverings not as a preventive measure but as a way to signal disapproval of him
We are now having to face the fact that this very feeble-minded person is back in charge. Just as he did when he was in his first term, when the news is good, he takes credit, and when it’s bad, he either blames Joe Biden or says it’s fake news or fake numbers. As NPR reminds us, his first press secretary, Sean Spicer, “celebrated a rosy jobs report” saying:
“I talked to the president prior to this, and he said to quote him very clearly,” Spicer said at the time. “They may have been phony in the past, but it’s very real now.”
He commonly said that any numbers he didn’t like were “fake” or “fudged.” During last year’s campaign, he told Time Magazine that the FBI had faked the crime statistics that said crime had gone down the previous year:
Trump: I don’t believe it. No, it’s a lie. It’s fake news.
Cortellessa: Sir, these numbers are collected by state and local police departments across the country. Most of them support you. Are they wrong?
Trump: Yeah. Last night. Well, maybe, maybe not. The FBI fudged the numbers and other people fudged numbers. There is no way that crime went down over the last year. There’s no way because you have migrant crime. Are they adding migrant crime? Or do they consider that a different form of crime?
That was an obvious denial in order to support his campaign strategy that America is under siege from immigrants. How long before his FBI toadies report statistics that back up his lies?
The difference in this term is that there are people around him who want to institutionalize that kind of innumeracy and irrationality as part of the administration’s larger plot to dismantle the government and fulfill Trump’s agenda. They are preparing to falsify data and cook the books in order to sell their schemes to the American people.
Take what our crack director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, did when the intelligence community failed to back Stephen Miller’s claim that the Tren de Aragua gang was a Venezuelan government group that had invaded the United States and therefore justified the invocation of the Alien Enemies Act. She fired the two top career officials who led the National Intelligence Council, the highest intelligence community analysis group that had released the information. Using the Trump administration’s usual Orwellian inversion of reality, she claimed she was rooting out the politicization of the community (of people who are disloyal to Donald Trump).
I don’t think anyone in the world is going to be able to trust anything coming out of U.S intelligence as long as Donald Trump and his accomplices are in office. Even Trump himself should be leery of Gabbard’s information now that she has iced out the CIA and personally taken over the preparation of the president’s daily brief (not that he pays much attention to it anyway).
That’s certainly dangerous. But just as dangerous is the plan to start manipulating the economic numbers in order to make the results of his policies look better. We know that he’s lying egregiously about them in public comments, as he usually does. But they have bigger plans.
Just last week, the administration eliminated the Federal Economic Statistics Advisory Committee and the Bureau of Economic Analysis, just days after Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick announced that he was changing the way GDP is calculated, which would provide more upbeat figures. He told Fox News:
“Governments historically have messed with GDP. They count government spending as part of GDP. So I’m going to separate those two and make it transparent.”
The consequences of doing something like this are quite grave. NPR reported that it would be a “major break from both long-standing practice and international standards. It could also serve to mask any negative effects of the Trump administration’s spending cuts.”
This is on top of attempts by DOGE to infiltrate the Government Accountability Office which is a legislative branch agency that has opened more than three dozen probes into reports that the Trump administration illegally withheld congressionally authorized funds, known as impoundment which Trump henchman Russell Vought seeks to use to usurp the congressional power of the purse.
And there is ongoing fear that the threat of Schedule F, the administration’s order to reclassify thousands of civil service protected employees into political positions, will affect the statisticians who collect and analyse the data that serves not only the U.S. economy but the world’s. As the Guardian reports:
Statistics released by agencies such as the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) and the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) are used by the Federal Reserve Bank to set inflation policy and interest rates. They also form the basis on which businesses and investors take decisions.
The US’s global reputation as a stable economic power and a reliable partner goes hand-in-hand with its long history of producing accurate data, dating back to the establishment of the BLS in 1884. Interfere with the latter and you risk sacrificing the former, experts warn.
Tara Sinclair, a professor at George Washington University’s Center for Economic Research, told NPR:
If the data were manipulated, even in a small way, that will affect the credibility of our entire statistical system,” she says. “And that’s going to have global financial implications, because people around the world rely on the quality of U.S. economic data to make decisions.”
It shouldn’t surprise us that the man who thought that not testing people in a global pandemic would make the virus disappear would also manipulate numbers to make his daft policies look more successful. But the changes his henchmen are contemplating will cause much more lasting damage even than the tariff madness. This could be the most disastrous policy of all and the list of them grows longer by the day.
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