Ex-Treasury Secretary Calls Trump Worse Than Nixon After Jobs Report Tantrum
After the release of a weak July jobs report and dismal updates to May and June numbers on Friday, a furious Trump sacked the top official at the Bureau of Labor Statistics in a post on Truth Social.
'The Economy is BOOMING under 'TRUMP,'' he declared while accusing BLS Commissioner Dr. Erika McEntarfer and her agency of manipulating employment statistics 'for political purposes.'
Following McEntarfer's unceremonious ouster, Larry Summers, the treasury secretary under former President Bill Clinton, warned that Trump's actions are a dire sign for democracy when he appeared on the Sunday episode of ABC's 'This Week.'
'This is way beyond anything that Richard Nixon ever did,' Summers told host George Stephanopoulos.
It's 'preposterous' for Trump to accuse the Bureau of Labor Statistics of warping employment numbers for political gain, Summers said, explaining that jobs data is meticulously calculated by hundreds of experts following rigorous formulas.
Alarmed that the president would act like the figures were anything but objective, Summers told Stephanopoulos, 'This is the stuff of democracies giving way to authoritarianism.'
Offering several more examples of Trump's autocratic impulses, he added, 'Firing statisticians goes with threatening the heads of newspapers, it goes with launching assaults on universities, it goes with launching assaults on law firms that defend clients that the elected boss finds uncongenial. This is really scary stuff.'
Trump's labor report tantrum follows his decision to sue Wall Street Journal reporters and the paper's owner, Rupert Murdoch, over reports detailing his alleged connections to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. He also appeared to strong-arm television giant Paramount into a $16 million settlement just as it was seeking federal approval for a major merger with Skydance Media.
The president successfully threatened to strip billions in funding from universities to drop their diversity, equity and inclusion policies while also accusing the institutions of failing to address antisemitism on campus.
Before that, Trump pressured nine of the nation's top legal outfits into providing a collective $1 billion in pro bono services to avoid retaliation for their connections to federal prosecutors who oversaw investigations related to his first impeachment and the criminal investigations into Trump supporters' Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
To Summers, the legal free-for-all and the tumult of Trump's ongoing tariff announcements seem like a recipe for economic instability.
'Who knows what business is going to be attacked next? Who knows what the rules are going to be?' he said. 'In an environment like that, what should a business do? It should sit, and it should wait.'
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