Peter Baker on Firing of Labor Statistics Chief: ‘The Message Is Clear,’ Don’t Produce Facts That Anger Trump or Risk Losing Your Job

RUHLE: “Peter, what is the White House saying about this? I know this morning they had said that Scott Bessent was leaving for vacation today. I got a sinking feeling he’s going to come on back.”

BAKER: “Well, look, you’re saying that these are skewed numbers, they’re following the president’s lead here and that these numbers can’t be trusted. He’s long criticized numbers that didn’t go the way he thought they ought to go, and he’s threatened this in the past. Now he seems to be carrying it out. The larger implications beyond the economic points that we’ve just been talking about is to the quality of truth and facts in the government writ large, right? If you’re a government official, if you’re a career official, you have just watched what’s happening here. And the message is clear. Don’t produce facts or numbers that in any way contradict or anger the president. Because if you do, you take a risk of losing your job. And that goes beyond the Labor Department, that goes beyond the economic sphere, that goes across the board. Look at what just happened the other day at the Smithsonian Museum of History. They took Donald Trump out of the exhibit on impeachments because they obviously knew that wasn’t something he wanted to have highlighted in an American museum. And instead, the exhibit now says there are only three presidents who were ever threatened with removal through impeachment, Andrew Johnson, Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton. Donald Trump’s name not there, erased from the history of that moment. Did Donald Trump order that? We don’t know that. But if you’re a person working for the federal government, it might be in your interest, you think, to scrub history that way, to scrub the facts on labor statistics, to scrub facts on climate or name any other area, and it causes a ripple effect throughout government and it does cause a lot of questions about the information we’re going to get now from the public sphere.”

RUHLE: “Dan, that begs the question, when are we going to hear from the business community?”