Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers had choice words for President Donald Trump after he fired his stats boss over an abysmal jobs report.
Trump fired Erika McEntarfer, the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), on Friday after the agency released its July jobs report showing that the economy added a mere 73,000 jobs—far below the White House forecast of 109,000 jobs. BLS also revised its job numbers down for May and June by 258,000.
Trump accused McEntarfer of having “RIGGED” those numbers “to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad.”
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“This is the stuff of democracies giving way to authoritarianism,” Summers told ABC News host George Stephanopoulos Sunday. “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.”
“This is way beyond anything Richard Nixon ever did,” Summers said. “I’m surprised that other officials have not responded by resigning themselves, as took place when Richard Nixon fired people lawlessly.”
Since assuming office in January, Trump has gone on a wide-ranging revenge campaign against his perceived adversaries.
In addition to targeting law firms that have engaged in work the administration finds objectionable with punitive executive orders, Trump has also gone after Columbia, Harvard, Cornell, Brown, and other top universities, cancelling billions of dollars’ worth of federal research funding and launching Justice Department investigations against colleges for their response to pro-Palestinian protests and their diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives.
In the latest salvo in Trump’s war on the press, in July Trump filed a $10 billion lawsuit against the Wall Street Journal over a story about a salacious drawing the president allegedly sent to accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein for his 50th birthday.
Summers also noted that it made little sense to fire the BLS chief given that the numbers stem from the work of hundreds of employees.
“These numbers are put together by teams of literally hundreds of people following detailed procedures that are in manuals. There’s no conceivable way that the head of the BLS could have manipulated this number,” Summers said.
Summers also hit Trump for his attacks on Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, whom Trump has fumed at for keeping interest rates steady.
“He’s looking to set up a scapegoat if the economy performs badly,” Summers said. “That’s what this attacking chairman Powell is really about. It’s not really about trying to change policy.”
