Trump’s ‘Queen of Hearts’ moment with the BLS echoes Putin’s purges and Orwell’s omens

After about 1900 years, Luis Carroll contributed to another spinning a non -double response to disappointment with the Queen of Hearts in the classic 1865 Is it not in the country of wonders?. “With their heads!” She was behaving, whenever she presented the topic of the information she bothered.

In the twentieth century, George Orwell delivered another version in his main work 1984: “Each record has been destroyed or falsified, and each book has been rewritten, each image was rewritten, and each image, street and building have been re -named, and each date has been changed. This process continues day after day.

Thus we reached August 2025 and President Donald Trump’s disturbing rejection of the Labor Statistics Commissioner, Erika Minarker, immediately after the release of a negative job report. On social media, Trump claimed without evidence that the Commissioner is “fake job numbers”. “I have faced problems with numbers for a long time. We are in good condition. I think the numbers were false as they were before the elections, and there were other times. So I launched them, and I did the right thing.”

In short, is the moment of “Queen of Hearts” in Trump, or something else?

Russian example

It is difficult to look beyond Trump’s long admiration for Russian President Vladimir Putin. We have also documented it in the past, Putin has a history to rewrite uncomfortable novels. ROSSTAT, the country’s official statistical agency, has a long record of addressing the economic data to please Putin. He is doing his best to amend poor personalities and hide unexpected statistics under pressure from the Kremlin, especially since Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The Russian Agency “turned into new methodologies” and “re -calcing data” with a frequency that warns of danger. Then there is a public political intervention – Putin launched the heads of Rozestate, transferring control of the agency to the political appointed, and appointed a blatant political choice as an economic deputy minister.

No wonder abroad, observers from international organizations to foreign investors regularly on warnings “about concerns about the reliability and consistency of the economic publications of Karmlin.” Putin now refuses to reveal the main economic indicators ranging from foreign trade data, monthly output data on oil and gas, capital flows and external flows, financial data for major companies, cash base data for the Central Bank, direct foreign investment data, local value added by industry, lending and loan preparation. Even Rosaviatsiya, Air Transport Agency in Russia, has stopped publishing data on air passengers.

However, these are high frequency flow statistics that are used to build the expectations of GDP at the economy level of any country-from the United States to China. Since the outbreak of the war, it appears that the International Monetary Fund has allowed Russia to violate its membership standards – which require member states to reveal and verify transparent national income statistics. Free markets cannot work without reliable information. For this reason, foreign direct investment in Russia has decreased from more than $ 100 billion to zero, and the activity of capital markets has almost frozen, that is, barely public subscriptions and little global interest in Russian securities.

Not only Russia

Of course, China is a little better. Official Chinese statistics have become widely recognized as being and baseless, so that analysts rely on a wide range of informal or agents to measure the real state of the Chinese economy. These shadow measures extend everything from satellite images to nightlife activity to measurement of pollution from SMOKESTACKS.

Even the best economic official in China, Prime Minister Le Kekiang, secretly confirmed that he does not believe that the official GDP numbers, instead it is preferable to monitor the sizes of rail charging, electricity consumption and bank loans.

Likewise, in 2022, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan began launching a series of senior economic officials who questioned his unconventional policy of reducing interest rates to combat inflation and stimulating an economic revival at the same time. Erdogan’s most subordinate procedure was to eventually remove him for Sait Dincer, head of the Turkish Statistical Institute, after the office informed an increase in inflation by 36 % on an annual basis. The Royal Statistical Association and the American Statistical Association condemned the “political intervention in the production of the president in the production of official statistics”, and urged it to allow the statistical institute “to produce objective statistical information”, a basic function “to ensure a health democracy in Türkiye and maintain international credibility in its statistics.

In Venezuela, President Nicholas Maduro has been said to have detained more than ten economists and consultants in recent months in an attempt to suppress any suggestions about a financial crisis that is exacerbated in his country.

Being with her head!

But this America is supposed to be different. Trump’s sudden fire surprised the market and economists from all political backgrounds.

Recently, on CNBC, Eileen Zhao, a long -term Republican and a former cabinet official (he held the position of Minister of Labor for eight years during the reign of George W. Bush and held the position of Minister of Transport at the first Trump administration) displaced directly on the president’s charges. Zhao told the audience: “It is very difficult to tamper with or interfere in these numbers. [conducting] The final analysis had occurred. Therefore, it is very unlikely. ”

Former BLS Commissioner William Beach, appointing another Trump, was published on social media shortly after Minarker’s launch on Friday, describing him as a “completely basis” decision “that sets a dangerous precedent and undermines the statistical mission of the office.” Beach also criticized the president’s move on Sunday, saying that his work was “undermining” the agency’s credibility.

Trump has a (small) point when he claims that BLS performance was slipping. Fears about the timing and accuracy of the BLS long -term data, with major reviews after only months. BLS and other statistical agencies acknowledged the need to update their methodology, but progress was slow. After Covid-19 disorders, the extent of job reviews was widespread in the past, despite attempts to improve their methodology. The last fall review on Friday, which offers more than 250,000 jobs, is the largest since the peak of the epidemic.

However, Trump’s accusations that BLS is fake jobs to weaken his credibility and Republican supporters highlight his tendency to distort the facts. His impulsive decision apparently remembers the launch of Minarker, based on an unfounded belief that BLS reviews were of political motives, a lot of literary photography of authoritarianism.

Reviews are a standard part of the BLS process, which is necessary to improve the accuracy of the American economy image with the arrival of new data. Since 2003, the average review has been about 51,000 jobs, not a small character in itself. Despite the allegations that may indicate otherwise, Trump’s tariff policies have introduced an unprecedented level of uncertainty in the American economy – they can only be approached until 2020 – with many economists who expect stagnation as a result. Bloomberg is convincingly suggested that there is a potential link between the size of negative job reviews and stagnation conditions.

Just as the leading companies around the world worked to move in the uncertainty resulting from the president’s economic policies, should we expect various results from a government agency that also faced employment restrictions and resource discounts due to the initiatives led by Dogs? In addition, the Trump administration’s decision to dissolve the Federal Statistical Consulting Committee in March removed a vital mechanism to improve the performance of the agency, including updating data collection, scheduling and analysis. While concerns about BLS methods, such as relying on meters instead of scanner data, are valid and interest in attention, this is not the right way to process them.

This is far from the first time that Trump has the statistical integrity of the political theater. Other notorious examples include how, after Trump accidentally confirmed that there will be a “95 % chance” that Dorian Hurricane will strike Alabama, and insisted on showing the maps of the hurricane with a doctorate with a path drawn on Alabama, in a clear contradiction to the predictions of NOAA. Or there was a time when Trump demanded the Foreign Minister of Georgia Brad Ravenbons “to find 11,000 votes”, and he insisted that he won the 2020 presidential elections and shot his deputies such as Bill Bar and Chris Krebis who refused to confront his denial in the elections.

Recently, in April 2025, Trump announced the “mutual” definitions on liberation day based on actual mutual commercial barriers, but rather a misleading formula based on the trade deficit, which led to the announcement of Trump numbers that “makeup” and “wrong”. Finally, there was a routine of Trump’s routine of the size of the crowd in his careers, and demanding that his subordinates claim that his first opening ceremony was the most attended in history, as he contradicted real data through Nielsen classifications, live broadcast numbers, and the metro overlap, where I attended it. “We look forward to literature. Fire in fact.

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