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AUSTRALIA LOOKING AT THE TRUMP SAGA IN THE USA How Trump’s sacking of stats chief is another 'slide into autocracy' The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age PLAY YOUTUBE VIDEO Original article: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CVFwO6dCF_o
How Trump’s sacking of stats chief is another 'slide into autocracy' The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age Aug 7, 2025 217K subscribers ... 53,428 views ... 829 likes The Morning Edition Podcast If you heard the news that Donald Trump fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics on Friday and responded with a shrug, you probably weren’t alone. How do or die are monthly jobs statistics? And wasn’t this just another instance of Trump attacking someone whose findings he didn’t like? Not according to experts from across the political aisle, who have raised the alarm that this move represents a different threat, altogether. Even for Donald Trump. Today, international and political editor Peter Hartcher, on what history tells us happens once a country’s leader starts controlling facts. #donaldtrump #uspolitics #podcast Subscribe to our journalism: https://subscribe.smh.com.au/ https://subscribe.theage.com.au/ Listen to our podcasts: https://podcasts.smh.com.au/ https://podcasts.theage.com.au/ Peter Burgess COMMENTARY Peter Burgess Transcript 0:00 America's not going to get totalitarian, but it is becoming authoritarian. Orwell said that political speech is designed to make truth look false, designed to make murder look respectable and designed to give the appearance of solidity to pure wind. So you end up with there is no reality. Nothing can be believed. And so when a people believe nothing, all they're left with is the ruler. If you heard the news that Donald Trump fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics on Friday and responded with a shrug, you probably weren't alone. How do or die are monthly job statistics? And wasn't this just another instance of Trump attacking someone whose findings he didn't like? Not according to experts from across the political aisle who have raised the alarm that this move represents a different threat altogether, even for 1:00 Donald Trump. Today, international and political editor Peter Harter on what history tells us happens once a country's leader starts controlling the facts. Okay, Peter. So, let's start with the basics. Who did Donald Trump have fired on Friday and why? He fired a lady called Erica McInter who was the director of the Bureau of Labor Statistics which sounds like a small think tank or some arcane body but it's actually the institution that produces the core economic statistics for the United States. So she was America's national statistician and so tell us like what sort of data does her bureau put out? The one over which she was sacked was the uh employment jobs numbers um which is pretty important uh because it tells you what's happening to the jobs market whether it's getting stronger or weaker uh whether unemployment is getting better or worse. But it also puts out 2:02 the inflation measure uh which is critical to uh whether interest rates are supposed to be going up or down uh to tell you whether inflation is under control or not. Uh and a whole raft of other statistics. Now just to you know put a fine point on it. Trump Trump called the data rigged. He called the report a scam. He said the numbers were ridiculous. Just before the election, this woman came out with these phenomenal numbers on Biden's uh economy, phenomenal numbers, and then right after the election, they announced that those numbers were wrong. And that's what they did the other day. So, it's a scam in my opinion. My opinion is just it's just additional scam. But there's no evidence, is there, that Dr. McInterer actually cooked the books, right? Like my understanding is the evidence is quite to the contrary that this is a bureau that's very trustworthy. Well, it was consistent with past 3:01 practice everything that the bureau did. And in fact, the woman who is the director of the Labor Department under which the bureau sits, a Trump appointee and a Trump loyalist uh that morning went uh public to say that the jobs numbers were positive and to say everything is okay. And I can tell you this, what I'm hearing on the ground is positive. People are excited about what's happening on the ground. We're setting the table for a positive economy and uh the American worker is going to win in this occasion because the president has their back. But then when Trump changed the tune by denouncing her and saying it's rigged, then the labor secretary uh changed her story and immediately said, 'Oh, it's terrible. Everything's shocking and this is all fake.' It's the numbers that we're questioning. It's the accuracy. It's the modernization. Could there have been a harder look? Should we have had more information and more decision-making factors as to where these numbers came from? That's the question. And the the official who had run the bureau in Trump's first term also went 4:02 public to say this is completely normal practice. There's nothing wrong here. Uh no professional investor, economist, statistician has said that there was any departure from normal practice. Doesn't mean the numbers were perfect. The numbers are never perfect because you're trying to measure jobs growth across, you know, a quarter of a billion uh people. So, it's always a sample. There are problems with the samples. The samples are routinely revised up or down in following months as more information comes to hand. All of that was going on with this number, but that is absolutely normal. And we know certainly I know now more than I did before after reading your column that reliable statistics are absolutely crucial to democracy. Right. So, walk us through this. Why so? Well, there are the specifics like, you know, what what should interest rates be set at, but the much bigger picture and why this is such a telling moment, I think, is that if you if you have agreed points of reality, if you can agree on 5:00 some uh official data, then you have a starting point and perhaps even an ending point for debate and policy. But if nothing is fixed, nothing is agreed and everything is subject to political manipulation, which presumably uh everybody will now suspect the numbers in future will be because Trump will no doubt appoint eventually uh a politically reliable, trustworthy uh figure to run this bureau. So even if that person does the job honestly and uh punctiliously there will forever now be a suspicion over the numbers produced by that bureau. Uh now there will be compensating things will happen. Private sector outfits will try to produce their own estimates. That's exactly what happened in China when uh when the Chinese government was plainly fudging their figures to make growth look better than it was. And in fact, it was the former premier of China, Lee Chung, who said, 'Oh, don't worry about 6:01 the GDP figures.' He said, 'They're man-made.' And he himself uh proposed an alternative formula for trying to measure trying to gauge growth in the Chinese economy while ignoring the official statistics and he was he became the premier. Uh so this is a a wellestablished pattern in autocratic societies. It's not in the US. That's why it's a big story because it's part of the tendency of the Trump administration to drive the US uh into an autocratic mindset and political system. Uh depriving the country of objective reality and objective facts so that everything can then be subject to manipulation and redefinition by the leader who in an autocratic system becomes the only source of reality. That's he's not there yet. He's a long way from that, but that's the course he's on. This is a real marking point, I think. And he still has uh nearly three and a 7:01 half years to go. Well, let's get into this because in your column you referenced the German Jewish historian and philosopher Hannah Arent and her seminal book, The Origins of Totalitarianism. Now, you know when Hannah comes up that that things really are taking a very dark turn. So, what's the endgame? Like what's the worst consequence that comes out when you know people are ripe as you've written for mass confusion, delusion and doubt, which of course is what happens when they're getting all kinds of information, you know, fact is truth and truth is fact, and they don't know which way's up. Yeah. So that's that's still a fair way from where we are. But what sets the conditions for some of this um is a unique combination of circumstances. uh conspiracy theories which are an old phenomenon but then uh the internet and uh social media which hypercharge and supercharge both the reach and the rapidity with which conspiracy theories 8:00 can be retailed reinvented and believed. And if you put that together with a president who for years now has been a master of the conspiracy theory, in fact, I I would submit he's possibly the most effective and prolific producer uh of conspiracy theories, maybe only in competition with Russian bot farms, troll factories. Um that is a that is a very potent combination and Trump is using that to his own advantage. Samantha, I was amazed. I knew that Trump, we all know that Trump is big on promoting conspiracy theories, but I I looked up how many he might have supported. The very first one that got him attention politically was the one about Barack Obama, the so-called birther uh conspiracy theory that he'd been born in Kenya. He was secretly a Muslim and therefore as a foreign citizen, he couldn't be US president. But uh according to the Wikipedia uh page that lists that keeps a list a running list of all the conspiracy 9:02 theories propagated by Trump. Anybody can look it up. There are 87 that he has propagated himself. And then there's a bunch more of uh other conspiracy theorists he's retweeted, endorsed or hired. Uh it's a that's a big roll call 87. So put together the uh high velocity 9:24 and rapidity of conspiracy theories amplified and accelerated through constant social media churn with a population that has become increasingly vulnerable uh to Donald Trump's uh own definition of reality and a man who's prepared to keep pushing that and and pushing the envelope and breaking new barriers. And it does lead you. This is exactly the modus operandi with the the modern tweak of social media added that dictators through history have used. So that's where you end up. It in fact it 10:01 can it can backfire on the dictator ultimately. So George Orwell I quoted Hannah Arent. George Orwell is another great um uh wellspring of analysis and thinking about totalitarianism. America's not going to get totalitarian, but it is becoming authoritarian. Orwell said that political speech is designed to make truth look false, designed to make murder look respectable and designed to give the appearance of solidity to pure wind. So you end up with there is no reality. Nothing can be believed. And so when a people believe nothing, all they're left with is the ruler. And that can work. that can work for a long time. Uh the Chinese Communist Party is the world's most uh durable uh one party 11:00 state and I mean there's no sign that they're about to they're about to collapse. There's a there's a good uh there's a good amount of uh suspicion and anecdotal evidence that it's hollowing out. The credibility of the regime is hollowing out with the slowdown in the economy, but it's still running. But ultimately, these these things can fail. And uh the Soviet Union is the outstanding example because although they believed the leader and uh they believed all the propaganda um for a long time, ultimately it was a people who believed in nothing. They could trust nothing, believe nothing uh and ended up hollowed out uh system where what looked robust and strong from the outside, you could just push it and it toppled over because there was no substance. Nobody believed anything including the leaders anymore, the party anymore, nothing at all. So it can backfire if you're uh too successful in in gutting uh a common grasp of reality. 12:01 Right. But I guess if that's an illustration then in the case of the Soviet Union really it takes for society to be at near collapse like to really to have bread endless bread lines and people just in absolute destitute destitute uh scenarios to sort of really see what's happening. Yes. and the dominant ruler in the early phase of course Stalin. It served him very well for a very long time to the end. So, uh that took a very long time. Yeah. Well, it's funny you mentioned Stalin. I mean, normally we don't talk about Stalin being funny and it's not funny. But I I was, you know, reading the commentary about Trump's latest firing and and one of the examples that the New York Times at least gave was that in the former Soviet Union under Stalin, uh the Soviet census official was arrested and executed when his population count came in lower than Stalin had announced. So, we know that these can get to really dark places. And I guess my question is, do you have any sense of how the American people are feeling about it in in isolation? It's taken days before even the most serious American press has 13:01 started to analyze and ruminate on the deeper implications of this uh for big investors and economists to start saying, 'Well, hold on. What are we going to do for reliable information?' the ordinary uh people are generally too preoccupied with their daily tasks and needs to be politically engaged enough to fully care about the sacking of just one more person. I mean, most people struggle to keep their own jobs or look for jobs, which was the point of the jobs number over which she was fired, right? That the jobs market was at its weakest in 5 years. That's right. He' said, you care enough about the one official who got got fired. Sorry. No, no, that's it. No, cuz he had been saying I believe for months that the US now has the hottest economy and as I saw someone write about, you know, what's been happening, you know, these figures show that it's lukewarm at best. Yeah, that's right. And you had the anecdote about uh you know, how do you what do you do with inconvenient uh official statistics? Um another good 14:00 example from China was a couple of years ago where the unemp youth unemployment rate was was going up and up. uh and it was obvious to anybody in the society that uh young people were having a harder and harder time to get jobs as the economy slowed and stagnated. Uh so when that unemployment rate got to 21% that series was simply canceled and disappeared and for a few months there was no publication of any youth unemployment rate. Problem gone. Miraculously, well, miraculously, a few months later, um, a new series, a recalibrated series started publishing which had the youth unemployment rate down to 15%. So, all it takes is a little re-calibration, um, and the problem goes away. So, this is exactly the sort of manipulation that uh, dictators love to do and dictators can get away with. And so, what sort of short-term impacts are we likely to see, do you think, for the United States? like are we likely to see some real economic problems? 15:01 Well, it's not adding any uh positive no incentive for investors to keep faith in the US. There have been a lot of anxieties from almost the beginning of the Trump administration about uh his commitment to for example uh fiscal policy, the debt uh and what he's done with the so-called big beautiful bill is to commit to trillions of extra dollars of debt. Uh there are questions about the dollar, questions about all sorts of things, his tariff policy. Uh but so far confidence hasn't cracked. There have been moments where markets have have had some anxiety, but nothing has yet cracked. This is just one more negative adding onto the negative side of the ledger for investors who are thinking about the the US. So I wouldn't say it's going to crack. But look, this brings us to the big one, which is the Federal Reserve, which is the central bank of the United States, because this is inextricably bound up with the story that we're 16:00 talking about. Well, tell us this because as you pointed out in your column, you know, logic would dictate that Trump, who really hates the head of the Reserve Bank in America, Jerome Powell, you know, he's constantly calling him names. he's been pressuring him for for as long as I can remember really to to finally cut interest rates and and he has refused. Uh this would have been the perfect excuse for him to finally sack him and go, 'Look, you've got it wrong. You haven't cut interest rates. These numbers aren't good.' So tell us what this means. Well, uh what it shows us is that when that statistic published showing the weakest job market in five years, Trump could have seized on that, turned around and said, 'Look, I've been vindicated. JP Pal has held rates too high too long. He's killing the economy. He's killing the jobs market. Everybody's suffering. I'm going to appoint a credible uh central bank governor, Federal Reserve chair, as they call it in their system. And uh we're going to deal with this problem. Instead, instead of of 17:02 targeting the economic player, he targeted the economic uh narrator, the person who produces the the statistics. because to my mind this shows us his his priority. It's more important to control the narrative and the and the uh his definition of facts than it is to control the actual economic outcome. So I thought that was a telling moment where it it shows you the allimp important value he places on narrative and on being the sole definer of facts. And what sort of narrative do you think he's actually does this tell us, you know, what sort of narrative he wants to tell? Or is it really just to confuse the people as with what we've been discussing to, you know, just be so confused that they have only his word to go by and essentially he can just control the people? Like, is that what this indicates or is there a particular narrative that he's wanting to spin? I think it's I think it's I think it's two. I think there's a specific and then the general. The specific is that he promised remember his first uh 18:02 inauguration uh he had said that America was in a state of American carnage. Yes. And then he has promised to replace that with a golden age. Make America great again. Uh so by changing the economic narrative or let me say redefining the economic statistics to make things look better than they really are. uh he's trying to say, 'Look, I'm delivering on my promise of the golden age. It's not the weakest job market in 5 years. That's that's rigged. Things are better than that and it's all great.' So that's the specific. The general though is, as you say, this is just one part of a much broader movement. He doesn't want any alternative source of fact or expert opinion even. So he's intimidating the elite universities to shut up their experts. Uh he's defunding the public broadcasters. Um he's unleashed an anti-science health secretary to shut down the two great sources of uh health 19:02 and science research in the US um the National Institutes of Health and the CDC Center for Diseases Control. Um he it's it's a war against science, a war against knowledge, a war against expertise, which is partly consistent with any populist. They're always anti- elitist. But in this case, it's also to take down uh any alternative source of uh expertise again to emphasize himself as the only and central source of reality. And I want to ask you what what you think is scarier from this entire scenario that we're discussing. Is it that Trump has made this move by showing yet again he's willing to fire a senior government official whose facts don't flatter him politically? Or is it that nobody in his administration has revolted against it? Yeah. Well, I I suppose it's a measure of the progress he's making that nobody will stand up to him. Uh and the Republicans in the Congress similarly, 20:01 not not entirely, not uniformly uh spineless, but it's getting pretty close. So, what's going to stop or resist uh this movement? What's going to push back? Uh so far the Democrats have proved utterly uh useless. The Republicans have all surrendered to Trump. His administration, as you say, they're all they're all simply reading the talking points and following the leader. So uh an unopposed leader is automatically, that's the definition of an autocrat. So the the vaunted institutions which were supposed to stand against a a tyrannical overcoming um of the of the US they're not doing so well. Uh the courts are still producing some resistance and some objective checks on his power and to a point they're working but again uh he's ignored some rulings. 21:00 He's respected some others, worked his way around some others, but again, we're not even one year into his term. He's a long way to go. Well, I guess this brings me to my last question, which is, you know, I'm going to bring it back to Hannah Arent because you took me down a rabbit hole to to find out what she had um what she had written about, you know, how people can stand up against authoritarian rule. She had experienced it herself. And she says, you know, the most important thing for a citizen is to be able to think for themselves. that free thought is everything. So where do you think Americans or the rest of us can turn to now when when we can't trust the facts that are coming out of the United States? Well, we are not not quite there yet. Uh and as long as there's a free media, that is a that is a powerful uh counter. Uh Trump of course is suing uh US media outlets. The public ones he's defunded uh PBS, NPR. the uh private ones he sues for outlandishly large sums. He, as you 22:01 know, he's gone after the Wall Street Journal and Ripet Murdoch for 10 billion US minimum. Other outfits have buckled under the uh the weight of defamation suits that he's brought against them. Um and the combination of the possibility of losing large sums of money plus the power that he wields over their commercial fortunes has seen some major US media companies buckle to his power. So at the moment the free press is still robust uh and the system that system of free speech and free media is holding up. Uh it might be who knows maybe that's an impossible goal for him to extinguish in such a large vibrant uh and well accustomed uh country accustomed to free speech. Maybe that's a bridge too far for him. But maybe it's not. Uh we will see. Well, thanks so much Peter for your 23:01 time. It's a grim subject but a pleasure chatting with you.

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