Trump has resorted to making numbers and experts say that we should worry all

Washington – Donald Trump has a simple solution when the numbers tell him something he does not want to listen: invent new numbers.

The president’s strategy, if you want to call it, was in vivid exhibition this week on three fronts: its decision to designate a conservative friends for an essential federal agency responsible for compiling monthly unemployment numbers, its decision to declare an emergency in Washington, DC, which dismisses the data in the city in the city and in the ups of the decades and its demand for a new and probable census of inconexion.

In general, when Trump is in power, he likes paint a pink image of an America where everything is going as good as it can be. When he is out of office, Trump makes very false statements about the national unemployment rate and the crime rate to attack the Democrats. During his 2016 presidential campaign, for example, Trump said the unemployment rate was As high as 42%, Although it was around 5% at that time.

But after a government report suggested that the labor market is cooling in its second mandate, Trump seems to be preparing to make snacks or manipulate the office of labor statistics, shooting its respected leader and announcing plans to replace it with a partisan candidate that suggested Get rid of monthly jobs reports entirely. And that’s After the unemployment rate had only increased one tenth of a percentage point.

At the same time, Trump is deploying National Guard troops to patrol the streets of the capital, despite the figures that Trump’s own department of justice has promoted showing a fall in the crime there. He has pressed Goldman Sachs to replace his main economist after warning that US consumers will pay a large part of Trump’s rates, and has closed government data collection that helps inform the political leaders, even in the Environmental Protection Agency and NASA.

Experts say Trump moves from authoritarianism seen in other countries.

“It is part of what academics would call the authoritarian play book: undermine factual information and falsify things that you know are true,” Natalie Koch, a professor at the University of Syracuse who investigates authoritarianism, told News themezone.

Bloomberg through Getty Images

Koch has Personality crops studied And he said that when Trump does something as stating without foundations, employment numbers are “manipulated”, the statement itself is a flexion.

“This type of lies really, very shameless … serve more than that kind of purpose of demonstrating power and the ability to simply bend people,” Koch said.

Monthly jobs numbers compile surveys from thousands of companies and government agencies. The method is not perfect and does not include all businesses, which would be expensive and not very practical. Reports are often reviewed up or downwards, when there is more information available. Trump’s allies have indicated the decrease in survey response rates as a reason for the supposed lack of reliability of employment numbers, but have not demonstrated any will to address the problem, which has widely confused researchers and probably would cost money to solve.

“He would certainly have to pay more for the short -term program, because he has to do all the investigation behind the system redesign. And the statistical agencies want to do this? Yes, but there have been no funds for additional programs in the BLS for 15 years,” said Erica Groshen, who served as BLS commissioner from 2013 to 2017, in an interview in an interview.

Trump is upset because the previous two months The growth of employment during their presidency were reviewed downward in the job report for July. He nominated the Heritage Foundation economist, eg Antoni, a BLS critic, to direct the agency in the future, a selection that has alarmed conservative and liberal economic experts.

Democrats warn that Antoni’s confirmation could even lead the government to blindly fly to a recession.

“Ex Antoni is an unconditional right-wing extremist who will not be thought twice before manipulating BLS data and degrading the agency’s credibility to make Trump happy, and has already suggested that important data stabilized completely,” said Senator Patty Murray (D-Wash) in a statement. “Putting it in charge of the BLS is a dangerous movement that puts non -partisan economic data, and by extension, our entire economy, at risk.”

It is not clear if Antoni will have enough republican support in the Senate to be confirmed as BLS president. But Senator Bill Cassidy (R-La.), Who directs the Senate Committee with jurisdiction over his nomination, said Tuesday that he agreed with Trump that the agency needs to produce “impartial” economic information.

Trump is making similar efforts to exhaust the data on the fall in the crime in Washington. Talking to journalists at the Kennedy center on Wednesday, Trump urged the city to publish “real” statistics on violent crimes in the district. He City has reported That violent crime fell 35% last year and 24% so far this year. The DC Police Union accused the City Department of the City of classifying erroneous crimes to create a false appearance of improvement, but the city’s numbers track with similar trends in other large cities.

“The whole matter is a manipulated treatment,” Trump said. “They said it is the best in 20 years. No, it is the worst in 20 years.”

The White House Advisor, Stephen Miller, went further in a mail Online: “The statistics of crime in large blue cities are false. The real crime, chaos and dysfunction rates are higher magnitude orders,” he wrote. “All those who live in these areas know it. They schedule their entire life around them.”

The Washington Post through Getty Images

The crime in Washington, although even higher than in other cities in the United States, is at a minimum of 30 years. He supplied badly following the pandemic of the Coronavirus, but since then he has dropped, as one of the main executors of Trump’s Maga acknowledged a few months ago.

“Thanks to the leadership of President Trump and the efforts of our ‘Make DC Safe Again’ initiative, the district has seen a significant decrease in violent crime,” wrote the former interim prosecutor of the United States, Ed Martin in a April press release THat still lives on the DOJ website. “We are demonstrating that strong application and intelligent policies can make our communities safer.”

Last week, Trump announced that he had ordered the Department of Commerce to carry out a new census, one excluding undocumented immigrants. It is an incredibly important survey to understand the demography of the country and distribute its political representation.

“People who are in our country will not be counted in the census,” the president wrote on social networks.

Trump’s directive is contrary to the Constitution, which requires a census every 10 years, the next one is supposed to be in 2030, and says that the government should tell everyone.

Trump expects a quick and partial counting to help his party in the middle of the period next year. If the Democrats resume the Chamber, a result that many analysts probably consider, then the administration will have to deal with the citations, and Trump could face the accusation.

Koch, the scholar of authoritarianism, told News themezone that Trump has not been nothing if not consistent.

“I’ve been thinking about the fact that Trump said it would only be a dictator on the first day,” Koch said. “And what we have seen so far is that it has been a dictator during the last seven months.”