And that’s dangerous
Brian Beutler has a great piece today about the possible Trump crack-up. He begins by recalling an episode I think most of us have forgotten but which foreshadowed the recent firing of the BLS administrator:
When COVID-19 reached the U.S. five and a half years ago, Donald Trump—then in his first term—had made little progress purging the government of civil servants willing to level with the public.
So we got the truth. Just not from him.
What he said was: “You know, a lot of people think that goes away in April with the heat—as the heat comes in. Typically, that will go away in April.” And then: “You have 15 people, and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero, that’s a pretty good job we’ve done.”
The truth was: we were in the early days of a pandemic that would badly disrupt our economy and way of life. And we know he knew the truth because, when he knew his comments would remain secret for months or years, he told Bob Woodward the coronavirus was “deadly stuff.” He said it would be “more deadly than your, you know, your—even your strenuous flus.”
So when, just two weeks after his interview with Woodward, the CDC’s top respiratory infection and epidemic specialist Nancy Messonnier warned the public that “disruption to everyday life might be severe,” Trump had her muzzled.
He knew the best possible analysis painted a bleak picture, so he created a huge disincentive for anyone in government to share good analysis. Tell the public the truth and imperil your career. The key is that this impulse of his only kicks in when he knows the stakes of looming developments are large, negative, and likely to implicate him. When people might blame him for calamity, or turn to him for the kind of steady-handed leadership he’s incapable of providing.
If he’d been told that the coronavirus would sweep through the U.S. quickly, one and done, killing about as many people as seasonal flu, nobody would have been muzzled.
Thanks to this defect in Trump’s character, we’re about to learn whether a president can shield himself from the political consequences of a slowing or shrinking economy with lies and propaganda. Is a recession like the pandemic, where events are seismic enough to overwhelm official lies? Or is Trump right to conclude that his big mistake in 2020 was not having enough control over what people hear; too many candid bureaucrats, too many people consuming credible news?
If fewer beltway reporters had memories that reset to zero over night, more of them might have recalled this recent history on Friday, when Trump fired Erika McEntarfer, the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, for the sin of issuing the government’s monthly employment report on schedule. They’d recognize the pattern, and report on it, rather than pass along the White House’s self-serving cover story.
Beutler makes an astute observation:
Trump’s rash decision to fire McEntarfer—like silencing Messonnier and manufacturing scarcity of COVID-19 tests—only makes sense if he fears her numbers are close to the mark. That more bad data awaits us in the months ahead.
As he says, Trump has always been given much more credit than he deserves because of his stupid reality TV game show “The Apprentice” and years of bs PR. But now?
[F]or the first time, he finds himself unable to convince majorities that he’s got a magic economic touch. As the situation deteriorates, he’ll have to either reverse course—changing pretty much everything about the way he’s governing—or else go to even greater lengths to control information and manipulate the public.
He will obviously choose door number two. It’s a bit like February 2020 all over again, except we’re in the early days of a recession rather than a pandemic, and instead of reluctantly acknowledging its existence, Trump intends to deny reality altogether. Because this time he has more control over what the government says and does.
The lesson Trump and his henchmen took from that was that they weren’t authoritarian enough:
This time around he seems intent on testing the proposition; engaging in more coverups, purging the government of more honest brokers, and flooding the zone with more shit. But that means he’ll make more mistakes, too.
Consider his ongoing coverup of the Epstein files.
I’m not sure I’ve ever seen Trump so unsettled. Not during Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation, not during his first impeachment, not during the first year of the pandemic.
The wobbling economy surely has something to do with this. But the brittleness of the Jeffrey Epstein coverup seems to have him most rattled.
I agree with this. I’ve never seen him quite this freaked out. There’s something there and he doesn’t know how to handle it. Beutler sees some turbulence ahead but also some possibilities. We don’t know what Trump is going to do when the recession hits. After all, that’s a real thing that fudging the statistics won’t fix.
[H]e’s managed to engineer a situation where GDP could decrease and prices could increase, depriving the Federal Reserve of its main tool for stimulating a weak economy. It’s a recipe for a continuous loop of deterioration and denial.
What would Trump do faced with a hard-to-kick recession or stagflation, if not change policy? My guess is immense scapegoating, accelerating smash-and-grab corruption, and farther-reaching efforts to rig the 2026 elections. By the same token, he will resist pressure to release the Epstein files unless and until he comes to fear impeachment and removal—which he likely never will.
He suggests this will result in Trump creating more baseless persecutions of Democrats and critics which unfortunately, I think is probably correct. What else can he do? But I’m not sure how much longer that’s going to work either. Buckle up.