WASHINGTON (AP) — When the coronavirus surged during President Donald Trump’s first term, he called for a simple fix: Limit the amount of testing so the deadly outbreak looked less severe. When he lost the 2020 election, he had a ready-made reason: The vote count was fraudulent.
And on Friday, when the July jobs report revisions showed a distressed economy, Trump had an answer: He fired the official in charge of the data and called the report of a sharp slowdown in hiring “phony.”
Trump has a go-to playbook if the numbers reveal uncomfortable realities, and that’s to discredit or conceal the figures and to attack the messenger — all of which can hurt the president's efforts to convince the world that America is getting stronger.
“Our democratic system and the strength of our private economy depend on the honest flow of information about our economy, our government and our society,” said Douglas Elmendorf, a Harvard University professor who was formerly director of the Congressional Budget Office. “The Trump administration is trying to suppress honest analysis.”
The president's strategy carries significant risks for his own administration and a broader economy that depends on politics-free data. His denouncements threaten to lower trust in government and erode public accountability, and any manipulation of federal data could result in policy choices made on faulty numbers, causing larger problems for both the president and the country.
The White House disputes any claims that Trump wants to hide numbers that undermine his preferred narratives. It emphasized that Goldman Sachs found that the two-month revisions on the jobs report were the largest since 1968, outside of a recession, and that should be a source of concern regarding the integrity of the data. Trump's aides say their fundamental focus is ensuring that any data gives an accurate view of reality.
Not the first time Trump has sought to play with numbers
Trump has a long history of dismissing data when it reflects poorly on him and extolling or even fabricating more favorable numbers, a pattern that includes his net worth, his family business, election results and government figures:
— Judge Arthur Engoron ruled in a lawsuit brought by the state of New York that Trump and his company deceived banks, insurers and others by massively overvaluing his assets and exaggerating his net worth on paperwork used in making deals and securing loans.
— Trump has claimed that the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections were each rigged. Trump won the 2016 presidential election by clinching the Electoral College, but he lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton, a sore spot that led him to falsely claim that millions of immigrants living in the country illegally had cast ballots. He lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden but falsely claimed he had won it, despite multiple lawsuits failing to prove his case.
— In 2019, as Hurricane Dorian neared the East Coast, Trump warned Alabama that the storm was coming its way. Forecasters pushed back, saying Alabama was not at risk. Trump later displayed a map in the Oval Office that had been altered with a black Sharpie — his signature pen — to include Alabama in the potential path of the storm.
— Trump's administration has stopped posting reports on climate change, canceled studies on vaccine access and removed data on gender identity from government sites.
— As pandemic deaths mounted, Trump suggested that there should be less testing. “When you do testing to that extent, you’re going to find more people,” Trump said at a June 2020 rally in Oklahoma. “You’re going to find more cases. So I said to my people, ‘Slow the testing down, please.’”
While Trump's actions have drawn outcry from economists, scientists and public interest groups, Elmendorf noted that Trump's actions regarding economic data could be tempered by Congress, which could put limits on Trump by whom he chooses to lead federal agencies, for example.
“Outside observers can only do so much," Elmendorf said. “The power to push back against the president rests with the Congress. They have not exercised that power, but they could.”
White House says having its own people in place will make data 'more reliable’
Kevin Hassett, director of the White House National Economic Council, took aim at the size of the downward revisions in the jobs report (a combined 258,000 reduction in May and June) to suggest that the report had credibility issues. He said Trump is focused on getting dependable numbers, despite the president linking the issue to politics by claiming the revisions were meant to make Republicans look bad.
“The president wants his own people there so that when we see the numbers, they’re more transparent and more reliable,” Hassett said Sunday on NBC News.
Jed Kolko, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics who oversaw the Census Bureau and Bureau of Economic Analysis during the Biden administration, stressed that revisions to the jobs data are standard. That's because the numbers are published monthly, but not all surveys used are returned quickly enough to be in the initial publishing of the jobs report.
“Revisions solve the tension between timeliness and accuracy,” Kolko said. “We want timely data because policymakers and businesses and investors need to make decisions with the best data that's available, but we also want accuracy.”
Kolko stressed the importance in ensuring that federal statistics are trustworthy not just for government policymakers but for the companies trying to gauge the overall direction of the economy when making hiring and investment choices.
“Businesses are less likely to make investments if they can't trust data about how the economy is doing,” he said.
Not every part of the jobs report was deemed suspect by the Trump administration.
Before Trump ordered the firing of the Bureau of Labor Statistics commissioner, Erika McEntarfer, the White House rapid response social media account reposted a statement by Vice President JD Vance noting that native-born citizens were getting jobs and immigrants were not, drawing from data in the household tables in the jobs report.
Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer also trumpeted the findings on native-born citizens, noting on Fox Business Network's “Varney & Co.” that they are accounting "for all of the job growth, and that’s key.”
During his first run for the presidency, Trump criticized the economic data as being fake only to fully embrace the positive numbers shortly after he first entered the White House in 2017.
White House says transparency is a value
The challenge of reliable data goes beyond economic figures to basic information on climate change and scientific research.
In July, taxpayer-funded reports on the problems climate change is creating for America and its population disappeared from government websites. The White House initially said NASA would post the reports in compliance with a 1990 law, but the agency later said it would not because any legal obligations were already met by having reports submitted to Congress.
The White House maintains that it has operated with complete openness, posting a picture of Trump on Monday on social media with the caption, “The Most Transparent President in History.”
In the picture, Trump had his back to the camera and was covered in shadows, visibly blocking out most of the light in front of him.
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Associated Press writer Michelle Price in Washington contributed to this report.
Josh Boak, The Associated Press
