The New Yorker:

When the facts don’t fit the President’s narrative, he asks for new ones, as evidenced by his recent firing of the Bureau of Labor Statistics commissioner.

By Fergus McIntosh

Donald Trump had many priorities upon returning to the Presidency, and one of the most pressing was to get Winston Churchill back into the Oval Office. A bust of Britain’s wartime Prime Minister, of whom Trump is a “big fan,” had kept him company throughout his first term, and for the past six months it has sat next to the office’s gilded fireplace, lurking in the background of Trump’s meetings with other world leaders. Trump admires Churchill’s glower, which he channelled for both his mugshot and his official Inauguration portrait, and he sees himself, much like Churchill, as the singular savior of a beleaguered nation. Perhaps it was a Churchill quotation—an apocryphal one, as it happens—that Trump had in mind last week when he fired Erika McEntarfer, the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics: “I only believe in statistics that I have doctored myself.”

McEntarfer was nominated as head of the B.L.S. in 2023, by Joe Biden, and confirmed by the Senate, in an 86–8 vote, with most Republicans, including now Vice-President J. D. Vance, joining Democrats in the majority. She has a background as a high-flying but uncontroversial government economist, with stints at the Census Bureau, the Treasury, and the Council of Economic Advisers. Much of her work has been focussed on the provision and analysis of labor-market data: the exact subject that got her fired.

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