ECONOMIC FABULISM, ORWELLIAN EXERCISE, PETULANT CHILD

If you’ve been paying attention, by now you know that all future jobs numbers will be coming from the guy who says he’s 6’3″ tall and weighs 215 pounds…oh, and is a complete master at the game of golf — with a proper caddy. George Stephanopolous on ABC’s This Week said President Trump’s administration resembles the authoritarian regimes of Venezuela and Turkey after he fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics for releasing a “RIGGED” report for July. BLS Commissioner Erika McEntarfer’s report showed only 73,000 jobs were added to the employment rolls, after the White House had estimated 109,000 jobs would be added, with Trump claiming it was meant “to make Republicans, and ME, look bad. I’ve had issues with numbers for a long time, but today’s — we’re doing so well. I believe the numbers were phony just like they were before the election, and there were other times. So you know what I did, I fired her.” Stephanopolous said, “Suppressing statisticians is a time-honored tool for leaders trying to solidify their power and stifle dissent. It’s happened throughout history. Most recently in Venezuela and Turkey, where presidents punished officials and economists who do not toe the party line.” McEntarfer was appointed by Joe Biden in 2023 to compile the closely watched employment report, as well as consumer and producer price data, and the Democrats were quick to criticize the firing as an attempt by the administration to manipulate data, warning of lasting damage to the economy. The BLS also revised sharply downward the data from May and June, showing 258,000 fewer jobs were created than had previously been reported. Economists attributed the sharply slower job growth to Trump’s trade and immigration policies, saying uncertainty about tariff levels had made it difficult for businesses to plan for the future according to Reuters.

The satirical Borowitz Report disclosed that the president had found a replacement for Commissioner McEntarfer: “In one of the most stunning political comebacks in American history, on Monday Donald J. Trump picked the disgraced former congressman George Santos to lead the Department of Labor Statistics. ‘This is such an honor,’ Santos told reporters. ‘I really didn’t think I’d get pardoned before Ghislaine.’ The new DLS chief hit the ground running, revising the job figures from every month of Trump’s presidency. ‘The American economy added a million new jobs in May and a billion new jobs in June,’ Santos declared. ‘President Trump is creating jobs like crazy — he even gave on to Pete Hegseth.’ The unprecedented job growth has boosted Trump’s approval rating, which Santos said currently stands at 140 percent.”

Mike Nellis writes on Endless Urgency, “It’s the mistake of thinking you can spin people out of their own lived experience. That you can gaslight the country into believing the economy is strong…when it’s clearly, tangibly not.” He recalls an interview on Fox News when the host and another guest laughed at his statement that everything is more expensive under Trump, only a few days later to have a Fox poll showing Trump with a -30% rating on inflation. Nellis says, “People aren’t stupid. Prices are still high and they’re getting more expensive, not less — largely because of Trump’s own tariffs. Americans aren’t buying the spin. They’re living the struggle. And now, Trump has fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics — not because the numbers were wrong, but because they didn’t flatter him. He wants a ‘single source of truth,’ and that source is him. His ‘truth’ is whatever serves his ego. Even when it’s a lie. This is more that authoritarian fluff. It’s economic gaslighting. Just like claiming there have been ‘zero border crossing’ in the last three months. It’s not even a good lie. It’s just lazy. You can get away with gaslighting people on stuff they don’t track. But you can’t tell them they’ve ‘beaten inflation’ while their rent’s going up, their groceries cost more, and their credit card balance is rising. And it’s not just working-class families feeling the squeeze. A recent report from VantageScore found that even people making $150,000 a year are falling behind on their bills. And yet, the GOP and their media echo chamber keep pushing this fantasy that Trump fixed the economy. Two weeks ago, he said it from the White House lawn. It’s nonsense — and it’s not going to work.”

CNN’s Stephen Collinson says, “One big danger now is that Trump’s economic fabulism will gather its own momentum and infect confidence in government statistics that will long outlive his presidency. If Trump appoints a politicized official to head the BLS with an incentive to please him, the pressure on officials to produce corrupted data would be intense. If job numbers are worse next month, will he fire someone else? And if the numbers improve, will anyone believe in their integrity?” Collinson wrote that Trump infamously told supporters, “Just remember, what you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.” This was the mantra that guided his COVID-19 response and culminated in his ‘Big Lie‘ about the 2020 election, and many observers call Trump’s actions an ‘Orwellian‘ exercise in rewriting reality. Former New Jersey governor, Chris Christie, called President Trump a “petulant child” upon his firing of Commissioner McEntarfer. “When he gets news he doesn’t like, he needs someone to blame because he won’t take the responsibility himself,” Christie said on ABC. “It seems to me from everything I learned over my years as governor, that it would be almost impossible for anyone to try to rig these numbers because so many people are involved in putting them together, and in the end, when it comes to the director of BLS, all she’s doing is being a conduit of the information.”

To back up Christie’s summation, former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers told George Stephanopolous, “This is way beyond anything that Richard Nixon ever did. I’m surprised that other officials have not responded by resigning themselves, as took place when Nixon fired people lawlessly. This is a preposterous charge. These numbers are put together by teams of literally hundreds of people following detailed procedures that are in manuals. There is no conceivable way that the head of the BLS could have manipulated this number. This is the stuff of democracy giving way to authoritarianism. Firing statisticians goes with threatening the heads of newspapers. It goes with launching assaults on universities. It goes with launching assaults on law firms.” Stephanopolous disclosed that the White House had declined to provide a guest for his Sunday show to respond to the firing and the “rigged jobs report,” even as Trump’s cronies scrambled to defend the situation. White House Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett said, “The president wants to see his own people there so that when we see the numbers, they’re more transparent and more reliable.” Senator Elizabeth Warren told CNBC in an interview, “Well, look, you know, you get bad data, you kill the messenger, right? And that’s Donald Trump because he thinks he can bend reality. If he can just tell a different story, then everyone will have to believe his story.”

The New York Times’ Zolan Kanno-Youngs believes that Trump’s knee-jerk firing of McEntarfer is a sign of his increasing agitation when things don’t go his way. Trump was relatively buoyed by his recent trip abroad, only to return home to be “confronted with foes and facts the he could not easily control, displaying another side of himself, responding with disproportionate intensity and a distinct impatience,” along with saber-rattling volatility over comments made by Russia’s Dmitri Medvedev. Former Trump administration official John Bolton said no one should be surprised at this uglier turn with Trump no longer able to tolerate facts and people refusing to “bend to his will.” Bolton told The Times, “I think he deliberately surrounded himself with ‘yes’ men and ‘yes’ women. It’s more evidence he’s not fit to be president. This is not the way a president responds to either one of these situations.” About Trump’s increased agitation with Russia, which Bolton believes Trump hasn’t thought through, he says, “He many not even understand what he’s doing. It’s so natural to him to say outrageous things that he’s incapable of thinking about the strategic consequences. Trump is not deterred by reality. He just says what the wants to say.” “You can wear a mask and paint your face; You can call yourself the human race; You can wear a collar and a tie; One thing you can’t hide, is when you’re crippled inside,” — John Lennon said that.

Donald Trump’s frequent bizarre public appearances, which have seen him claim that his uncle knew the Unabomber, or that windmills cause a litany of health problems — not to mention a plethora of problems for the petroleum industry, of course, raising questions about his mental acuity. His odd behaviors at campaign events, during interviews, and spontaneous remarks at press conferences, or drifting off-topic as he did at a cabinet meeting last month when he spent fifteen minutes talking about decorating; and, we are all familiar with his misremembering facts about government and his own life. Trump has been excused from the same scrutiny received by Joe Biden despite bouts of confusion and unusual behavior as seen in his recent meeting with European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, when he sidestepped from their immigration discussion to ranting about windmills for two minutes. Harry Segal, lecturer at Cornell University’s psychiatry department, and at Weill Cornell Medicine, calls the abrupt changes in conversation an example of Trump’s “digressing without thinking — he’ll just switch topics without self-regulation, without having a coherent narrative.” A questioner approached him regarding aid toward the famine in Gaza, with his response being that the US gave $60 million “two weeks ago — no other country gave anything,” not realizing or remembering that the UK allocated $80 million, and the European Union allocated $195 million, the Guardian finding no evidence that the US had given anything in the past two weeks. Last month the US State Department approved a $30 million grant to the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, a group backed by Israeli and US interests which has been criticized by Democrats as “connected to deadly violence against starving people seeking food in Gaza.” No response from the White House questioning the claimed $60 million donation!

Harry Segal brought up another characteristic of Trump’s questionable mental acuity — confabulation. “It’s where he takes an idea or something that’s happened and he adds to it things that have not happened,” — the Unabomber story. Aside from the confabulation, there have been times when Trump seems unable to focus, such as during the 2024 campaign when he spent 40 minutes swaying to the music after a medical emergency occurred at the rally, and he called a ‘timeout’. His rambling speeches, drifting between topics, which he terms “the weave,” also draws scrutiny. Segal adds, “If a patient presented me with the verbal incoherence, tangential thinking, and repetitive speech that Trump regularly demonstrates, I would almost certainly refer them for a rigorous neuropsychiatric evaluation to rule out a cognitive illness.” John Gartner, psychologist and author who was an assistant professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University Medical School for 28 years said, “What we see are the classic signs of dementia, which is gross deterioration from someone’s baseline and function. If you go back and look at film from the 1980s, Trump actually was extremely articulate. He was still a jerk, but he was able to express himself in polished paragraphs, and now he really has trouble completing a thought and that is a huge deterioration. I predicted before the election that he would probably fall off the cliff before the end of his term. And at the rate he is deteriorating, you know…we’ll see. But the point is that it’s going to get worse. That’s my prediction.”

Travis Gettys on Raw Story reports that there may be good news about drug prices!: “The president sent letters last week to the heads of 17 major pharmaceutical companies demanding they cut prices to levels paid by other countries, but he repeated a claim last week to reporters that he would reduce the cost for prescription medications by a whopping 1,500 percent — which many social media users pointed out was absurd.” Health policy professor Miranda Yaver posted: “The thing about lying about cutting prescription drug prices is that while a lot of economic policy is too complicated for the average American to understand, Americans know whether they’re paying more/less for their prescriptions when they go to the pharmacy.” Don Moynihan mockingly posted: “We are going to cut prices by 1500% and I fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics because she is incompetent.” Child psychologist and professor Ellen Braaten wrote: “Today’s best confabulation by our esteemed president.” HuffPost White House correspondent S.V. Dáte posted: “This is how this works: The prescription costs $100. You go to the drug store to pick it up, and instead of paying the pharmacist, the pharmacist gives you the medicine AND $1,400! Why didn’t any previous president think of this!?” “Tomorrow, it’ll be eleventy thousand percent, and the media will report it without question, and we’ll all shake our heads and move along, and it’ll be just another day of reality eroding before our eyes,” posted author Jennifer Erin Valent.

A few weeks ago, on ‘The Jim Acosta Show,’ Democratic strategist James Carville was asked whether he was worried about potential vote tampering from President Trump and senior aide, Stephen Miller. Carville said he wouldn’t “put anything past” Trump to prevent Democrats from taking back Congress, perhaps going so far as to cancel elections entirely to retain power for himself and MAGA. He feels that Trump fears what may happen in Virginia and New Jersey, and with retirements, or office holders distancing themselves from him, he will panic, and in Carville’s words “try to steal another one,” especially in light of possible impeachment proceedings being launched by a Democratic Congress. Acosta was taken aback by Carville’s predictions, but agreed that Trump has determination to stay in power. “He can think of things like that, that we can’t, because we’re not accustomed to thinking like that. We always assume there’s going to be an election, in your case, ‘How do I cover the election?’ My case, ‘How do I affect the election?‘ said Carville. “This is a whole new thing. You have every reason to be scared. Don’t kid yourself,” he warned.

Mike Nellis provides further insight into Trump’s furtiveness: “When gaslighting stops working, Republicans reach for their favorite tool — rigging the rules. Texas Republicans introduced a radically gerrymandered congressional map designed to hand them five more House seats in 2026. It’s not subtle. It’s not legal (yet). But it is strategic. Why? Because Donald Trump asked for it. And today’s GOP doesn’t resist Trump — they obey him. Let’s be clear: this map isn’t about governing or fairness. It’s about fear. Fear of a changing electorate. Fear of suburban voters, young people, and Black and brown Texans. Fear of competition. And above all — fear of losing. So instead of trying to win votes, they’re trying to erase them. They’re cracking and packing districts, slicing up communities of color, and drawing lines so surgically partisan it would make a corrupt Tammany Hall boss blush. This isn’t confidence. It’s cowardice. Texas Republicans are trying to redraw reality to protect themselves from accountability. Because they know they’re losing — and instead of improving, they’re cheating. And if that weren’t authoritarian enough? When Democratic legislators fled the state to block the vote, Republicans didn’t stop to reflect what they were doing to democracy. They threatened legal action. Floated arrests. Anything to force a vote on a map that serves Trump — not Texans. That’s not democracy. That’s hostage politics.”

Nellis says the map is being dictated straight from Mar-a-Lago, a national redistricting scheme orchestrated by a man who couldn’t name a Texas county if his life depended on it — this isn’t conservatism. It’s autocracy with a Southern accent. This tactic is being taken to other states, because the way to hold onto power is by rigging the system — redraw the map, change the rules. Nellis believes the GOP can’t be saved this way — gerrymandering doesn’t pay the grocery bill, doesn’t make one forget that the monthly paycheck is depleted by mid-month, doesn’t reduce the rent, or get proper meals at school for the kids. Kicking 20 million off health care and cutting food assistance for 18 million kids simply to give billionaires yet another tax cut shows Americans that the Republicans don’t care. It’s not leadership — it’s theft. Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security aren’t handouts if we all pay into it. Our contributions to our economy, paid with taxes from our hard work is part of the deal — we are supposed to get some payback, but Republicans have once again broken their part of this agreement, and are digging their own political graves. The GOP isn’t governing. They’re not planning. They’re not solving. They’re lying, cheating, and redrawing the board. Tariffs are wrecking the economy, and Trump has no plan to fix it — only looking after himself and his inner circle with ill-gotten riches.

Satirist Andy Borowitz has posted a fictitious letter that Texas Governor Abbott MAY have sent to his fellow Americans (read Republicans): “My fellow Americans: As you may know, 51 cowardly Democrat legislators are on the run from Texas. They are shirking their duty to rid our glorious state of the representative government that has plagued us for far too long. These Democrats could be anywhere. They could be in your town. They could be hiding under your bed. More likely, they are at a farmer’s market, selecting artisanal pickles. The following tips to help you identify Democrats in your midst: 1) Democrats are often seen carrying tote bags featuring the logos of PBS, NPR, Doctors Without Borders and other subversive organizations. 2) Democrats do not eat cats and dogs, but they do rescue them. 3) Someone driving a car with a bumper sticker that says ‘RELEASE THE EPSTEIN FILES’ could be a Democrat, but it could also be a member of QAnon. If the car stereo is playing Bruce Springsteen, it’s a Democrat. If you see someone with any of these identifying characteristics, remember: Democrats are dangerous. Some may be armed with concealed pocket Constitutions. To help bring these fugitives to justice, immediately report your sighting to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton. He will be standing by at one of his three primary residences. God Bless America, Gov. Greg Abbott.”