The moment of the “ queen of Trump hearts’ with the BLS echoes the purges of Putin and the omens of Orwell

About 1,900 years later, Lewis Carroll contributed to another rotation on the bad mood response to disappointment with the Queen of Heart in her classic 1865 Alice in Wonderland. “About with their heads!” She exclaimed, whenever a subject provided information that moved her.

In the 20th century, George Orwell delivered another version in his premonitory masterpiece 1984: “Each record has been destroyed or falsified, each book has been rewritten, each image has been repainted, each statue and street and building has been renamed, each date has been changed. And this process is continuous day after day and minute.

Thus, we arrive in August 2025 and the disturbing rejection by President Donald Trump of the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Erika Mcentarfer, immediately after the publication of a negative employment report. On social networks, Trump said without evidence that the commissioner “simulated job figures”. He continued by saying: “I have problems with the figures for a long time. We are going so well. I believe that the figures were false as they were before the elections, and there were other times. So I pulled it, and I did the right thing. ”

In short, is Trump’s queen’s moment from Trump, or something more?

The Russian example

It is difficult to look beyond the longtime admiration of Trump of Russian President Vladimir Putin. As we have documented in the past, Putin has a story of rewriting annoying stories. Rosstat, the country’s official statistics agency, has a long -standing record for manipulation of economic data to please Putin. This goes into great efforts to modify the bad figures and hide the unflattering statistics under the pressure of the Kremlin, in particular since the invasion of Putin in Ukraine in 2022. The Russian agency was “passed to new methodologies” and to “recalculate the data” with an alarming frequency. Then there is manifest political interference – Putin pulled the leaders of Rosstat, transferred agency control to people appointed politicians and appointed a flagrant political choice as deputy economic minister.

It is not surprising that external observers ranging from international organizations to foreign investors regularly sound alarms concerning “concerns concerning the reliability and consistency of the economic versions of the Kremlin”. Putin now refuses to disclose the main economic indicators ranging from foreign trade data, monthly petroleum and gas data, capital inputs and outputs, financial statements for large companies, central basic basic data, foreign direct investment data, interior value added by industry and loan creation and loan data. Even Rosaviatsiya, the Federal Air Transport Agency from Russia, has stopped publishing data on air passenger volumes.

However, it is the main high frequency flow statistics that enter into the construction of a GDP forecast on the economy level for any nation – from the United States to China. Since the start of the war, the IMF has apparently allowed Russia to violate its membership standards, which obliges Member States to disclose transparent, verifiable and complete national income statistics. Free markets cannot work without confidence information. This is why foreign direct investments in Russia have increased from more than $ 100 billion to zero, and the activity of capital markets has been practically frozen, with barely no IPO and little world interest in Russian titles.

Not just Russia

Of course, China is a little better. Official Chinese statistics have become so widely recognized as manipulated and base that analysts rely on a wide range of unofficial or proxy indicators to assess the true state of the Chinese economy. These shadow measures extend, from satellite imagery to the activity of nightlife commensurate with pollution outside the chimneys.

Even the highest economic official in China, Prime Minister Le Keqiang, secretly said that he did not believe that the official number of GDP, preferring to monitor the volumes of rail freight, electricity consumption and disbursed bank loans.

Similarly, in 2022, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan led a series of senior economic officials who questioned his unconventional interest rate reduction policy to combat inflation and simultaneously stimulate an economic renewal. Erdoğan’s most consecutive action was his possible withdrawal from knowing Dincer, head of the Turkish Statistical Institute, after the office reported an increase in inflation of 36% in annual shift. The Royal Statistical Society and the American Statistical Association condemned jointly condemned “the president’s political interference in the production of official statistics”, the urgent to allow the Statistical Institute “to produce objective statistical information”, an essential function “to ensure a healthy democracy in Türkiye and maintain international credibility in its statistics”.

In Venezuela, President Nicolas Maduro would have held more than a dozen economists and consultants in recent months in order to remove any suggestion for aggravation of the financial crisis in his country.

With his head!

But it’s America, it’s supposed to be different. The brutal dismissal by Trump of Mcentarfer surprised market analysts and economists from all political backgrounds.

More recently, on CNBC, Elaine Chao, a long -standing Republican and former Trump’s office manager (she was secretary at work for eight years under George W. Bush and was transport secretary of the first administration of Trump) directly challenged the chairman’s charges. Chao told the public: “It is very, very difficult to falsify or interfere with these figures. BLS is very concerned about the safety of these figures … If something had to be across … One of these 40 people (driving) the final analysis would have spoken. So, it’s very unlikely.”

The former BLS commissioner, William Beach, another named by Trump, posted on social networks shortly after Mcentarfer’s dismissal on Friday, calling him a “completely baseless” decision which “establishes a dangerous precedent and undermines the statistical mission of the office”. Beach also criticized the president’s decision on Sunday, saying that his action “saps the credibility” of the agency.

Trump has a (small) point when he claims that the performance of the BL has slipped. The concerns concerning the speed and precision of BLS data are for a long time, the main revisions being until months later. BL and other statistical agencies have recognized the need to modernize their methodology, but progress has been slow. After the disturbances of COVID-19, the extent of employment revisions changed more widely than in the past, despite attempts to improve their methodologies. The recent on Friday revision, subtracting more than 250,000 jobs, is the largest since the peak of the pandemic.

However, Trump’s accusations that BLS simulated labor figures to weaken his credibility and that of his republican supporters highlights his tendency to distort the facts. His apparently impulsive decision to dismiss Mcentarfer, on a baseless conviction that BLS revisions were politically motivated, recalls so many literary representations of authoritarianism.

Revisions are a standard part of the BLS process, essential for improving the precision of the image of the American economy as new data arrive. Since 2003, the average revision has been around 51,000 jobs, not an insignificant full -fledged figure. Despite the claims that could suggest the opposite, Trump’s pricing policies have introduced an unprecedented level of uncertainty in the American economy – comparable that in 2020 – with many economists anticipate a recession accordingly. Bloomberg has convincingly suggested a possible link between the extent of negative employment revisions and recession conditions.

Like the main companies around the world have worked to sail in the uncertainties caused by the president’s economic policies, if we expect different results from a government agency which has also been faced with hiring restrictions and resource reductions due to arbitrary initiatives led by DOGE? In addition, the Trump administration’s decision to dissolve the Federal Statistics Advisory Committee in March has eliminated an essential mechanism to improve agency performance, including modernization of the collection, tab and data analysis. Although the concerns about BLS methods, such as dependence on enumerators instead of scanner data, are valid and deserve attention, it is not the right way to resolve them.

It is far from the first time that Trump has subordinate statistical integrity to the political theater. Other infamous examples include how, after Trump has wrongly affirmed that there would be a “95%chance” that the Hurricane Dorian would reach Alabama, he insisted to show tamped hurricane cards with a track drawn from Alabama, in all contradiction of Noaa forecasts. Or there was the moment when Trump demanded the secretary of state of Georgia Brad Raffensperger “finds me 11,000 votes”, insisting that he won the 2020 presidential election and dismissed his own deputies such as Bill Barr and Chris Krebs who refused to follow his election denial.

More recently, in April 2025, Trump announced “reciprocal” prices on the release day based not on reciprocal trade barriers, but rather on a deceptive formula based on trade deficits, leading economists to declare that the number of Trump was “invented” and “erroneous”. Finally, there was routine inflation by Trump of the size of the crowd during its gatherings, and demands that its subordinates claim that its first inauguration was the most frequented in history, contradicting factual data through the notes of Nielsen, live delivery numbers and the inauguration of the metro, with Kellyanne Conway City “Alternative Facts.” Look at literature. The strong men of George Orwell or Lewis Carroll do not retreat with facts; They dismiss the tares of truth.

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