Trump Is Spiraling
This is good news—but also, prepare for turbulence...
When COVID-19 reached the U.S. five and a half years ago, Donald Trump—then in his first term—had made little progress purging the government of civil servants willing to level with the public.
So we got the truth. Just not from him.
What he said was: “You know, a lot of people think that goes away in April with the heat—as the heat comes in. Typically, that will go away in April.” And then: “You have 15 people, and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero, that’s a pretty good job we’ve done.”
The truth was: we were in the early days of a pandemic that would badly disrupt our economy and way of life. And we know he knew the truth because, when he believed his comments would remain secret for months or years, he told Bob Woodward the coronavirus was “deadly stuff.” He said it would be “more deadly than your, you know, your—even your strenuous flus.”
So when, just two weeks after his interview with Woodward, the CDC’s top respiratory infection and epidemic specialist Nancy Messonnier warned the public that “disruption to everyday life might be severe," Trump had her muzzled.
He knew the best possible analysis painted a bleak picture, so he created a huge disincentive for anyone in government to share good analysis. Tell the public the truth and imperil your career. The key is that this impulse of his only kicks in when he knows the stakes of looming developments are large, negative, and likely to implicate him. When people might blame him for calamity, or turn to him for the kind of steady-handed leadership he’s incapable of providing.
If he’d been told that the coronavirus would sweep through the U.S. quickly, one and done, killing about as many people as seasonal flu, nobody would have been muzzled.
Thanks to this defect in Trump’s character, we’re about to learn whether a president can shield himself from the political consequences of a slowing or shrinking economy with lies and propaganda. Is a recession like the pandemic, where events are seismic enough to overwhelm official lies? Or is Trump right to conclude that his big mistake in 2020 was not having enough control over what people hear; too many candid bureaucrats, too many people consuming credible news?
If fewer beltway reporters had memories that reset to zero over night, more of them might have recalled this recent history on Friday, when Trump fired Erika McEntarfer, the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, for the sin of issuing the government’s monthly employment report on schedule. They’d recognize the pattern, and report on it, rather than pass along the White House’s self-serving cover story.
This shouldn’t be so hard. The cover story is incredibly thin! Trump admitted he fired McEntarfer because he didn’t like (or “believe”) the jobs numbers. But if Trump and his economic team really thought Friday’s jobs report was an outlier, if they were confident that, behind the numbers, the economy was actually booming, they had options. They could have made the case that this month’s numbers were off, or reflective of some passing disruption, as just about every president has argued at one point or another. If they truly believed the monthly jobs data is too noisy to be worth releasing, they could have revived efforts to improve survey responses. If BLS had somehow massaged the numbers to make Trump look bad (note: this did not happen), Trump and Republicans in Congress could have gotten to the bottom of it and had an amazing story to tell about Deep State sabotage.
Trump’s rash decision to fire McEntarfer—like silencing Messonnier and manufacturing scarcity of COVID-19 tests—only makes sense if he fears her numbers are close to the mark. That more bad data awaits us in the months ahead.
He’s right to worry. For most of his years in office, Trump has benefitted from unearned public trust in his stewardship of the economy. It even kept him afloat in 2020, as he managed to persuade most Americans that the pandemic-induced recession was an act of god, rather than a crisis he exacerbated through deceit and incompetence.
Today Trump is fully unbridled. Yet, for the first time, finds himself unable to convince majorities that he’s got a magic economic touch. As the situation deteriorates, he’ll have to either reverse course—changing pretty much everything about the way he’s governing—or else go to even greater lengths to control information and manipulate the public.
TAKING IT TO THE MAXWELL
He will obviously choose door number two. It’s a bit like February 2020 all over again, except we’re in the early days of a recession rather than a pandemic, and instead of reluctantly acknowledging its existence, Trump intends to deny reality altogether. Because this time he has more control over what the government says and does.
From the economic consequences of tariffs, to the human consequences of mass deportation, to the contents of the Epstein files, it’s clear the lesson Trump took from his first-term failures wasn’t that he had to be more competent, empirically minded, and transparent; it’s that he hadn’t established enough control over information to shield himself from the political consequences of unflattering news.
This time around he seems intent on testing the proposition; engaging in more coverups, purging the government of more honest brokers, and flooding the zone with more shit. But that means he’ll make more mistakes, too.
Consider his ongoing coverup of the Epstein files.
I’m not sure I’ve ever seen Trump so unsettled. Not during Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation, not during his first impeachment, not during the first year of the pandemic.
The wobbling economy surely has something to do with this. But the brittleness of the Jeffrey Epstein coverup seems to have him most rattled.
Trump’s other big Friday move was to spring Ghislaine Maxwell from her no-frills prison in Florida and transfer her to a minimum security facility in Texas. He wants to entice Maxwell to falsely exonerate him. He also clearly wants her to provide information (credible or not) inculpating any Democrats she’s willing to name. At the same time, he does not want her to inculpate him, either by making public statements about his conduct with Epstein, or by orchestrating damaging leaks.
Somehow through this admixture of bribery and blackmail, he gave a sweetheart perk to a child-sex offender. Did it extend the coverup by another few days at least? Yes. Was it a mistake? Also yes.
GOING STAG
Things will get really bumpy if it turns out Trump’s allergy to candor, and his inability to admit error, are stronger than his sensitivity to public opinion, particularly public opinion within MAGA. What will he do if his propaganda fails—if huge majorities demand a course correction, but there’s no way for him to correct course without completely reversing direction.
It’s already hard to say what Trump could do in theory to revive the strong economy he inherited. Perhaps if he credibly relinquished his tariffing and mass deportation regimes, businesses would hire, prices would drop, and trading partners would agree to sweep these past six months of unpleasantness under the rug.
Short of that, though, he’s managed to engineer a situation where GDP could decrease and prices could increase, depriving the Federal Reserve of its main tool for stimulating a weak economy. It’s a recipe for a continuous loop of deterioration and denial.
What would Trump do faced with a hard-to-kick recession or stagflation, if not change policy? My guess is immense scapegoating, accelerating smash-and-grab corruption, and farther-reaching efforts to rig the 2026 elections.
By the same token, he will resist pressure to release the Epstein files unless and until he comes to fear impeachment and removal—which he likely never will.
In the meantime he’ll manufacture more ersatz scandal material of any kind. He might be alone at the center of a child-rape scandal, but for him what matters most is that he fight Democrats to a draw on the questions of which party, and which political leaders, are most despicable. Which means more baseless persecution of more and higher-profile Democratic politicians and prominent anti-Trump figures.
Hold on to your butts.
I’d be fine offering Bill Clinton as tribute. The fact that we still let that guy headline the convention while it took approximately 30 seconds to bury Al Franken has always mystified me.
Another good article that is detailing how this administration is doing yeoman's work on fostering suspicions about the government. "We shouldn't trust the economic numbers? We shouldn't trust the CDC recommendations? We shouldn't trust the FBI?"
Terrific job by the Trump admin and the complicit media structure to fracture the nation. Love it.
And to exploit the feckless Democrats? Just amazing. Chef's kiss
Luckily Mamaw and Peepaw are gonna fall for it and continue to believe they are just one paycheck from becoming a millionaire because all those brown foreigners are gone thanks to Daddy Trump.
Donnie's spiral is going to be spectacular, but it's the aftermath and who on the MAGA right that scares me the most. The vacuum he will create will be worse than most of the stuff he's doing now.