'For fact sake: Why is Trump so bad with numbers?' – by Emily Maitlis

Read time: 4 mins

In brief...

• Erika McEntarfer was sacked by Donald Trump, who claims she rigged data to show a decline in the US jobs market.
• Emily Maitlis asks if any statistics issued from the Trump administration can be trusted if he reacts this way to numbers that he doesn't like, and what this means for America's future.

It is very, very unusual to be able to name the head of the US Bureau of Labour Statistics.

It’s a job - and indeed an office - few Americans barely know exist. The commissioner is not a household name even in their own household, as Sopel would say.

But suddenly, everyone is talking about Trump’s latest firing - and his accusation that she ‘rigged the jobs numbers’ – and wondering where this leads. Let’s start at the beginning: The Bureau of Labour Statistics is a body that works independently of government.

It’s filled with people who crunch lots of numbers. They carry out a survey based on 100,000 businesses across more than half a million places of work around the USA. They talk to employers to gauge how many people are on the payroll each month, and how much they were paid.

First thing Friday morning [1 August 2025] it brought out its usual monthly tally to indicate how the jobs market was doing. The figures were not spectacular. They showed a sharp cooling – and crucially they revised down the previous two months’ figures of May and June showing a three month slowing trend. At first, Trump sent his henchmen and women onto the airwaves to control the narrative, decree the economy was doing just great and argue that those numbers weren’t bad at all.

And then - something changed. Within a few hours, the commissioner – Erika McEntarfer, who had been appointed by Joe Biden in the previous term, was fired.   Trump claimed she had “rigged” the figures to help the former president. He provided no evidence and no insight. He demanded she be replaced with “someone more competent and qualified”.

It probably doesn’t need saying, but to avoid doubt I will: McEntarfer has spent decades in public service – for the office of tax policy and in the Census Bureau. She’s an economist by profession, and she almost certainly would not have had her hands on the numbers before her team – of around forty – put them together. A sacking of this kind is unprecedented, and screams deep personal insecurity. It’s the equivalent of breaking a pregnancy test because you don’t like the result, or smashing a thermometer for telling you it’s too hot.

But it goes deeper than that, and it’s far more worrying than one sacking. It undermines the ability of this agency – and presumably many others picking up the same bat signals – to work without interference. It raises questions about whether the job of the bureau is to report the objective facts or please the President. It tells the world that America’s data cannot be trusted – for foreign investment and trade which could cost trillions of dollars.

Trump has dallied with the firing of another figure crucial to the stability of the US economy, Jerome Powell, the head of the Federal Reserve, and one of the few people to have verbally stood up to Trump’s pressure to cut interest rates. After McEntarfer was fired, Powell’s deputy stepped down. Finishing her own term early, And leaving many to wonder if she’d read the doomscroll writing on the wall.

There has at least been cross party criticism of the latest Trump move, with many warning it's the act of a tinpot dictator of a tinpot economy. Certainly the spectre of Argentina looms large – a country so keen to cover up its own economic data in recent decades that it fired those responsible for the inflation figures when inflation didn't come down. The numbers issued by the government became so unbelievable the international community lost trust. It raised the rates of its lending and – here’s the morality tale – Argentina fell into crippling debt.

But arguably you don't need to go all the way to Argentina to find a template for Trump’s behaviour. There’s one that is much closer and that is, well, Trump.

It’s only five years ago that he told another official he didn't much like a certain set of numbers - and ordered the Secretary of State in Georgia to find him 11,780 votes. It became the basis for a lawsuit which would charge Trump with a criminal racketeering enterprise for ‘knowing and willfully joining a conspiracy to unlawfully change the outcome of the 2020 election in Georgia.’

Trump was unable to get the Georgia official, Brad Raffensperger, to budge on that fateful phone call. But it didn't stop him trying to change all the other numbers of the 2020 election – and encouraging his followers to try and overturn the result in a coup on the capitol. We know what happened on January 6th.

So perhaps the strangeness of Friday is anyone’s ability to still be shocked. We’ve seen what happens when Trump doesn't like his numbers, and we know what happens when good people do nothing but watch. If the rest of the world sees US data can no longer be trusted, then whatever those figures say out loud the economy is probably going to feel a whole lot worse...

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