Washington (AP) – When the coronavirus exceeded President Donald Trump during the first term of office, he called for a straightforward solution: narrow the test quantity, so that the deadly outbreak looked less sedate. When he lost the election in 2020, he had a prefabricated reason: the number of votes was fraudulent.
And on Friday, when the revisions of the jobs showed a needy economy in July, Trump had an answer: he fired the civil servant responsible for the data and described the report on a edged slowdown in the “wrong” setting.
Trump has a go-to-playbook when the numbers reveal unpleasant realities, and that should discredit or hide the numbers and attack the messenger-this can affect the president’s efforts to convince the world that America becomes stronger.
“Our democratic system and the strength of our private sector depend on the honest information about our economy, our government and our society,” said Douglas Elmendorf, a professor of Harvard University, who was formerly director of the Congress budget office. “The Trump administration tries to suppress honest analysis.”
The President’s strategy carries considerable risks for his own administration and a broader economy that depends on political -free data. His denouncements threatened to reduce confidence in the government and to undermine public accountability, and any manipulation of federal data could lead to political decisions, which leads to major problems for both the president and the country.
The White House denies all claims that Trump wants to hide numbers that undermine its preferred stories. It was emphasized that Goldman Sachs found that the two-month revisions of the job report have been the largest outside of a recession since 1968, and this should be a concern about the integrity of the data. Trump’s helpers say that their fundamental focus indicates that data is an exact overview of reality.
Not the first time that Trump tried to play with numbers
Trump has a long story in the dismissal of data if you are poorly reflected on it and pay more favorable numbers, a pattern that includes his net assets, his family business, its election results and the state figures:
– Judge Arthur Engoron decided in a lawsuit by the state of New York that Trump and his company had deceived banks, insurers and others by massively overvalued his assets and exaggerated his net assets about paperwork that used business and loans.
– Trump claimed that the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections were manipulated. Trump won the 2016 presidential election by winning the election college, but lost the referendum to Hillary Clinton, a painful place that incorrectly claimed that millions of immigrants who lived in the country had illegally occupied ballot papers. He lost the election to Joe Biden in 2020, but wrongly claimed that he had won her, although several complaints could not prove his case.
– When the Hurricane Dorian approached the east coast in 2019, Trump Alabama warned that the storm came his way. Prognostics have withdrawn and said Alabama was not at risk. Trump later showed a card in the oval office that had been changed with a black Sharpie – his characteristic pen – to add Alabama to the potential path of the storm.
– The management of Trump has stopped publishing reports on climate change, broken off studies to access vaccines and removed data on the gender identity from state locations.
– As a Pandemic death, Trump suggested that there should be fewer tests. “If you test to this extent, you will find more people,” said Trump at a rally in Oklahoma in June 2020. “You will find more cases. So I said to my people:” Please leisurely the tests. “
While Trump’s actions of economists, scientists and interest groups are crying out, Elmendorf found that Trump’s actions in relation to economic data could be alleviated by the congress, which could set limits, for example, by which he leads to federal authorities.
“Foreign observers can only do so much,” said Elmendorf. “The authority to push back against the president is at the congress. They have not exercised this power, but they could.”
The White House says that giving your own people will make data “more reliable”
Kevin Hassett, director of the National Economic Council of the White House, aimed at the size of the downward revision in the job report (a reduced reduction of 258,000 in May and June) to point out that the report had credibility problems. He said Trump focused on receiving reliable figures, although the president connects the topic with politics by claiming that the revisions should make the Republicans look bad.
“The president wants his own people there so that they are more transparent and reliable when we see the numbers,” said Hassett on Sunday in NBC News.
Jed Kolko, Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, which supervised the Census Bureau and the Bureau of Economic Analysis during the Biden administration, emphasized that revisions of jobs were standard. This is because the numbers are published monthly, but not all surveys used are returned quickly enough to be in the first publication of the job report.
“Revisions solve the tension between topicality and accuracy,” said Kolko. “We want timely data because political decision -makers, companies and investors have to make decisions with the best available data, but we also want to accuracy.”
Kolko emphasized how critical it is to ensure that the national statistics are not only trustworthy for the government’s political decision -makers, but for companies who try to measure the general direction of the economy in hiring and investment decisions.
“Companies are less investing if they cannot trust data about how the economy is doing,” he said.
Not every part of the job report was classified as suspicious by the Trump administration.
Before Trump ordered the release of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Erika Mcentarfer, the Rapid Response Social Media Account published a explanation by Vice President JD Vance in which he found that born citizens received work and immigrants and did not come from data in the job reports in the job report.
Labor Secretary Lori Chavez deremer also entered the results of the born citizens and noticed in the “Varney & Co.” By Fox Business Network by Fox Business Network. That they “for all employment growth and that is the key.”
During his first run for the presidency, Trump criticized the economic data as wrong, only to fully employ the positive figures shortly after the first entry to the White House in 2017.
The white house says that transparency is a value
The challenge of reliable data goes beyond the economic figures about basic information about climate change and scientific research.
In July, reports on the reports financed by the taxpayer about the problems of climate change for America and its population have disappeared from state websites. The White House initially said NASA published the reports in accordance with a 1990 law, but the agency later said that this would not be that legal obligations were already fulfilled by submitting reports to the congress.
The White House claims that it operates with complete openness and published a picture of Trump on social media on Monday with the caption “The Most Transparent President in History”.
In the picture, Trump had his back to the camera and was covered with shadow, making most of the lithe visibly blocked in front of him.
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Associated Press Writer Michelle Price in Washington contributed to this report.
