How Trump’s sacking of stats chief is another 'slide into autocracy'

If you heard the news that Donald Trump fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics on Friday and responded with a shrug, you probably weren’t alone. How do or die are monthly jobs statistics? And wasn’t this just another instance of Trump attacking someone whose findings he didn’t like?

Not according to experts from across the political aisle, who have raised the alarm that this move represents a different threat, altogether. Even for Donald Trump.

Today, international and political editor Peter Hartcher, on what history tells us happens once a country’s leader starts controlling facts.

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Episode Transcript

S1 (00:03):
From the newsrooms of the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.
This is the morning edition. I'm Samantha Selinger Morris. It's Thursday,
August 7th. If you heard the news that Donald Trump
fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics on
Friday and responded with a shrug, you probably weren't alone.

(00:23):
How do or die are monthly jobs statistics? And wasn't
this just another instance of Trump attacking someone whose findings
he didn't like? Not according to experts from across the
political aisle who have raised the alarm that this move
represents a different threat altogether, even for Donald Trump. Today,
international and political editor Peter Hartcher, on what history tells

(00:46):
us happens once a country's leader starts controlling the facts. Okay, Peter,
so let's start with the basics. Who did Donald Trump
have fired on Friday, and why?

S2 (01:02):
He fired a lady called Erica McIntyre, who was the
director of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which sounds like
a small think tank or some arcane body, but it's
actually the institution that produces the core economic statistics for
the United States. So she was America's national statistician.

S1 (01:22):
And so tell us, like, what sort of data does
her bureau put out?

S2 (01:26):
The one over which she was sacked was the employment
jobs numbers, which is pretty important because it tells you
what's happening to the jobs market, whether it's getting stronger
or weaker, whether unemployment's getting better or worse. But it
also puts out the inflation measure, which is critical to

(01:49):
whether interest rates are supposed to be going up or down,
to tell you whether inflation is under control or not,
and a whole raft of other statistics.

S1 (01:59):
Now, just to put a fine point on it, Trump
called the data rigged. He called the report a scam.
He said the numbers were ridiculous.

S3 (02:06):
It's a scam in my opinion. My opinion is just.
It's just a scam.

S1 (02:12):
But there's no evidence, is there, that doctor McIntyre actually
cooked the books, right? Like, my understanding is the evidence
is quite to the contrary, that this is a bureau
that's very trustworthy.

S2 (02:21):
Well, it was consistent with past practice, everything that the
bureau did. And in fact, the woman who is the
director of the Labor Department, under which the bureau sits,
a Trump appointee, a Trump loyalist, that morning went public
to say that the jobs numbers were positive and to
say everything is okay.

S4 (02:41):
This what I'm hearing on the ground is positive. People
are excited about what's happening on the ground. We're setting
the table for a positive economy, and the American worker
is going to win in this occasion because the president
has their back.

S2 (02:54):
But then when Trump changed the tune by denouncing her
and saying it's rigged. Then the labor secretary changed her
story and immediately said, oh, it's terrible. Everything's shocking, and
this is all fake.

S5 (03:05):
It's the numbers that were questioning. It's the accuracy. It's
the modernization. Could there have been a harder look? Should
we have had more information, more decision making factors as
to where these numbers came from? That's the question.

S2 (03:17):
So and the the official who had run the bureau
in Trump's first term also went public to say this
is completely normal practice. There's nothing wrong here. No professional investor, economist,
statistician has said that there was any departure from normal practice.
Doesn't mean the numbers were perfect. The numbers are never
perfect because you're trying to measure jobs growth across, you know,

(03:40):
a quarter of a billion people. So it's always a sample.
There are problems with the samples. The samples are routinely
revised up or down in following months as more information
comes to hand. All of that was going on with
this number. But that's absolutely normal.

S1 (03:54):
And we know certainly I know now more than I
did before, after reading your column, that reliable statistics are
absolutely crucial to democracy, right? So walk us through this.
Why so?

S2 (04:05):
Well, there are the specifics. Like, you know, what should
interest rates be set at, but the much bigger picture
and why this is such a telling moment, I think,
is that if you have agreed points of reality, if
you can agree on some official data, then you have
a starting point and perhaps even an ending point for

(04:27):
debate and policy. But if nothing is fixed, nothing is
agreed and everything is subject to political manipulation, which presumably
everybody will now suspect. The numbers in future will be
because Trump will no doubt appoint eventually a politically reliable,
trustworthy figure to run this bureau. So even if that

(04:50):
person does the job Honestly and punctiliously, they will forever
now be a suspicion over the numbers produced by that bureau.
Now there will be compensating. Things will happen. Private sector
outfits will try to produce their own estimates. That's exactly
what happened in China when, uh, when the Chinese government
was plainly fudging their figures to make growth look better

(05:14):
than it was. And in fact, it was the former
premier of China, Li Keqiang, who said, oh, don't worry
about the GDP figures. He said, they're man made. And
he himself, uh, proposed an alternative formula for trying to
measure trying to gauge growth in the Chinese economy while
ignoring the official statistics. And he was he became the premier.

(05:36):
So this is a well-established pattern in autocratic societies. It's
not in the US. That's why it's a big story,
because it's part of the tendency of the Trump administration
to drive the US into an autocratic mindset and political
system are depriving the country of objective reality and objective

(05:58):
facts so that everything can then be subject to manipulation
and redefinition by the leader, who in an autocratic system,
becomes the only source of reality. He's not there yet.
He's a long way from that. But that's the course
he's on. This is a real marking point, I think.

(06:18):
And he still has, uh, nearly three and a half
years to go.

S1 (06:25):
Well, let's get into this, because in your column, you
referenced the German-Jewish historian and philosopher Hannah Arendt and her
seminal book, The Origins of Totalitarianism. Now, you know, when
Hannah Arendt comes up that that things really are taking
a very dark turn. So what's the end game like?
What's the worst consequence that comes out when people are ripe,
as you've written for mass confusion, delusion and doubt. Which,

(06:46):
of course is what happens when they're getting all kinds
of information, you know. Fact is, truth and truth is fact.
And they don't know which way is up.

S2 (06:54):
Yeah. So that's still a fair way away from where
we are. But what sets the conditions for some of
this is a unique combination of circumstances. Conspiracy theories, which
are an old phenomenon. But then the internet and social media,

(07:15):
which hypercharge and supercharge both the reach and the rapidity
with which conspiracy theories can be retailed, reinvented and believed.
And if you put that together with a president who
for years now has been a master of the conspiracy theory,
in fact, I would submit he's possibly the most effective

(07:35):
and prolific producer of conspiracy theories, maybe only in competition
with Russian bot farms, troll factories. Um, that is a
very potent combination, and Trump is using that to his
own advantage. Samantha, I was amazed. I knew that Trump.
We all know that Trump is big on promoting conspiracy theories,

(07:58):
but I looked up how many he might have supported.
The very first one that got him attention politically was
the one about Barack Obama, the so-called birther conspiracy theory,
that he'd been born in Kenya. He was secretly a muslim,
and therefore, as a foreign citizen, he couldn't be a
US president. But according to the Wikipedia page that lists

(08:18):
that keeps a list, a running list of all the
conspiracy theories propagated by Trump, anybody can look it up.
There are 87 that he has propagated himself. And then
there's a bunch more of other conspiracy theorists he's retweeted,
endorsed or hired. That's a big roll call. 87. So

(08:39):
put together the high velocity and rapidity of conspiracy theories
Is amplified and accelerated through constant social media churn. With
a population that has become increasingly vulnerable to Donald Trump's,
uh own definition of reality, and a man who's prepared

(09:02):
to keep pushing that and pushing the envelope and breaking
new barriers. And it does lead you. This is exactly
the modus operandi with the the modern tweak of social
media added that dictators through history have used. So that's
where you end up. In fact, it can it can
backfire on the dictator ultimately. So George Orwell, you've quoted

(09:27):
Hannah Arendt. George Orwell is another great wellspring of analysis
and thinking about totalitarianism. America is not going to get totalitarian,
but it is becoming authoritarian. Orwell said that political speech
is designed to make truth look false. Designed to make

(09:50):
murder look respectable and designed to give the appearance of
solidity to pure wind. So you end up with. There
is no reality. Nothing can be believed. And so when
a people believe nothing, all they're left with is the ruler.
And that can work. That can work for a long time.

(10:10):
The Chinese Communist Party is the world's most durable, uh,
one party state. And, I mean, there's no sign that
they're about to. They're about to collapse. There's a good
amount of suspicion and anecdotal evidence that it's hollowing out.
The credibility of the regime is hollowing out with the
slowdown in the economy, but it's still running. But ultimately,

(10:32):
these these things can fail. And, uh, the Soviet Union
is the outstanding example because although they believe the leader and, uh,
they believed all the propaganda for a long time. Ultimately,
it was a people who believed in nothing they could
trust nothing, believe nothing, and ended up hollowed out. A

(10:55):
system where what looked robust and strong from the outside,
you could just push it, and it toppled over because
there was no substance. Nobody believed anything, including the leaders anymore.
The party anymore? Nothing at all. So it can backfire
if you are too successful in in gutting a common
grasp of reality.

S1 (11:16):
Right. But I guess if that's an illustration, then in
the case of the Soviet Union, and really it takes
for a society to be at near collapse, like to
really to have bread. Endless bread lines and people just
in absolute destitute, uh, scenarios to sort of really see
what's happening.

S2 (11:30):
Yes. And the dominant ruler in the early phase, of course,
Stalin had served him very well for a very long
time to the end. So, uh, that took a very
long time.

S1 (11:39):
Yeah. Well, it's funny you mentioned Stalin. I mean, normally
we don't talk about Stellan being funny and it's not funny,
but I was, you know, reading the commentary about Trump's
latest firing and one of the examples that The New
York Times at least gave was that in the former
Soviet Union, under Stalin, the Soviet census official was arrested
and executed when his population count came in lower than
Stalin had announced. So we know that these can get

(12:01):
to really dark places. And I guess my question is,
do you have any sense of how the American people
are feeling about it in isolation?

S2 (12:09):
It's taken days before even the most serious American press
has started to analyze and ruminate on the deeper implications
of this for big investors and economists to start saying, well,
hold on. What are we going to do for reliable information?
The ordinary people are generally too preoccupied with their daily tasks,

(12:33):
and needs to be politically engaged enough to fully care
about the sacking of just one more person. I mean,
most people struggle to keep their own jobs or look
for jobs, which was the point of the jobs number
over which she was fired. Right? That the jobs market
was at its weakest in five years.

S1 (12:48):
That's right.

S2 (12:49):
He'd said, fair enough about the one official who got
got fired. Sorry.

S1 (12:53):
No, no. That's it. No, because he had been saying,
I believe for months that the US now has the
hottest economy. And as I saw someone write about, you know,
what's been happening, you know, these figures show that it's
lukewarm at best.

S2 (13:03):
Yeah. That's right. And you had the anecdote about, uh,
you know, what do you do with inconvenient, uh, official statistics?
Another good example from China was a couple of years ago,
where the youth unemployment rate was was going up and up,
and it was obvious to anybody in the society that

(13:23):
young people were having a harder and harder time to
get jobs as the economy slowed and stagnated. So when
that unemployment rate got to 21%, that series was simply
canceled and disappeared. And for a few months, there was
no Publication of any youth unemployment rate.

S1 (13:40):
Problem.

S2 (13:40):
Gone miraculously well. Miraculously, a few months later, a new series,
a recalibrated series started publishing, which had the youth unemployment
rate down to 15%. So all it takes is a
little recalibration. Um, and the problem goes away. So this
is exactly the sort of manipulation that dictators love to

(14:01):
do and dictators can get away with.

S1 (14:06):
We'll be right back. And so what sort of short
term impacts are we likely to see, do you think,
for the United States? Like are we likely to see
some real economic problems?

S2 (14:21):
Well, it's not adding any, uh, positive incentive for investors
to keep faith in the US. There have been a
lot of anxieties from almost the beginning of the Trump
administration about his commitment to, for example, Simple fiscal policy.
The debt and what he's done with the so-called big

(14:41):
beautiful bill is to commit to trillions of extra dollars
of debt. There are questions about the dollar. Questions about
all sorts of things. His tariff policy. But so far,
confidence hasn't cracked. There have been moments where markets have
have had some anxiety, but nothing has yet cracked. This
is just one more negative adding onto the negative side

(15:03):
of the ledger for investors who are thinking about the
the US. So I wouldn't say it's going to crack.
But look, this brings us to the big one, which
is the Federal Reserve, which is the central bank of
the United States. Because this is inextricably bound up with
the story that we're talking about.

S1 (15:20):
Well, tell us this, because as you pointed out in
your column, you know, logic would dictate that Trump, who
really hates the head of the reserve Bank in America,
Jerome Powell, you know, he's constantly calling him names. He's
been pressuring him for? For as long as I can remember,
really to to finally cut interest rates. And he has refused. Uh,

(15:41):
this would have been the perfect excuse for him to
finally sack him and go. Look, you've got it wrong.
You haven't cut interest rates. These numbers aren't good. So
tell us what this means.

S2 (15:49):
Well, what it shows us is that when that statistic
published showing the weakest job market in five years, Trump
could have seized on that, turned around and said, look,
I've been vindicated. Jay Powell has held rates too high,
too long. He's killing the economy. He's killing the jobs market.
Everybody's suffering. I'm going to appoint a credible central bank governor,

(16:13):
Federal Reserve chair, as they call it, in their system,
and we're going to deal with this problem. Instead, instead
of targeting the economic player, he targeted the economic narrator,
the person who produces the statistics. Because to my mind,
this shows us his His priority. It's more important to

(16:34):
control the narrative and his definition of facts than it
is to control the actual economic outcome. So I thought
that was a telling moment where it shows you the
all important value he places on narrative and on being
the sole definer of facts.

S1 (16:52):
Does this tell us, you know, what sort of narrative
he wants to tell, or is it really just to
confuse the people, as with what we've been discussing to,
you know, just be so confused that they have only
his word to go by and essentially he can just
control the people. Like, is that what this indicates, or
is there a particular narrative that he's wanting to spin?

S2 (17:09):
I think it's I think it's I think it's two.
I think there's a specific and then the general, the
specific is that he promised. Remember his first inauguration? He
had said that America was in a state of American carnage. Yeah.
And then he has promised to replace that with a
golden age. Make America great again. So by changing the

(17:33):
economic narrative or let me say, redefining the economic statistics
to make things look better than they really are, he's
trying to say, look, I'm delivering on my promise of
the golden age. It's not the weakest job market in
five years. That's that's rigged. Things are better than that.
And it's all great. So that's the specific. The general, though, is,
as you say, this is just one part of a

(17:54):
much broader movement. So he doesn't want any alternative source
of fact or expert opinion. Even so, he's intimidating the
elite universities to shut up their experts. He's defunding the
public broadcasters. He's unleashed an anti-science health secretary to shut

(18:15):
down the two great sources of health and science research
in the US the National Institutes of Health and the
CDC center for Disease Control. It's a war against Science.
A war against knowledge. A war against expertise, which is
partly consistent with any populist. They're always anti-elitist. But in

(18:38):
this case, it's also to take down any alternative source
of expertise, again, to emphasize himself as the only and
central source of reality.

S1 (18:50):
And I want to ask you what you think is
scarier from this entire scenario that we're discussing. Is it
that Trump has made this move by showing, yet again,
he's willing to fire a senior government official whose facts
don't flatter him politically? Or is it that nobody in
his administration has revolted against it?

S2 (19:06):
Yeah, well, I suppose it's a measure of the progress
he's making that nobody will stand up to him. Uh,
and the Republicans in the Congress are similarly not not
entirely not uniformly spineless, but it's getting pretty close. So
what's going to stop or resist Just this movement. What's

(19:29):
going to push back? So far, the Democrats have proved
utterly useless. The Republicans have all surrendered to Trump. His administration,
as you say. They're all they're all simply reading the
talking points and following the leader. So, uh, an unopposed
leader is automatically that's the definition of an autocrat. So

(19:51):
the the vaunted institutions which were supposed to stand against
a tyrannical overcoming, uh, of the, of the US. Well,
they're not doing so well. The courts are still producing
some resistance and some objective checks on his power. And
to a point, they're working. But again, uh, he's ignored

(20:14):
some rulings. He's respected some others. He's worked his way
around some others. But again, we're not even one year
into his term. He's a long way to go.

S1 (20:22):
I guess this brings me to my last question, which is,
you know, I'm going to bring it back to Hannah
Arendt because you took me down a rabbit hole to
to find out what she had, what she had written
about how people can stand up against authoritarian rule. She
had experienced it herself. And she says, you know, the
most important thing for a citizen is to be able
to think for themselves. That free thought is everything. So

(20:45):
where do you think Americans or the rest of us
can turn to now, when when we can't trust the
facts that are coming out of the United States?

S2 (20:52):
Well, we're not not quite there yet. And as long
as there's a free media that is a powerful counter. Trump,
of course, is suing US media outlets, the public ones.
He's defunded PBS, NPR, the private ones. He sues for

(21:13):
outlandishly large sums. As you know, he's gone after the
Wall Street Journal and Rupert Murdoch for $10 billion minimum.
Other outfits have buckled under the the weight of defamation
suits that he's brought against them, and the combination of
the possibility of losing large sums of money, plus the

(21:34):
power that he wields over their commercial fortunes, has seen
some major US media companies buckle to his power. So
at the moment, the free press is still robust, and
the system, that system of free speech and free media
is holding up. Uh, it might be. Who knows? Maybe

(21:55):
that's an impossible goal for him to extinguish in such
a large, vibrant, and well accustomed country. Accustomed to free speech.
Maybe that's a bridge too far for him, but maybe
it's not. Uh, we will see.

S1 (22:11):
Well, thanks so much for your time.

S2 (22:14):
It's a grim subject, but a pleasure chatting with you.

S1 (22:30):
Today's episode of The Morning Edition was produced by Kai Wong.
Our executive producer is Tammy Mills. Our head of audio
is Tom McKendrick. The Morning Edition is a production of
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(22:56):
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I'm Samantha Selinger. Morris. This is the morning edition. Thanks
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