‘Crazy Stuff!’ Dan Abrams Says Trump BLS Firing Spells Disaster
Mediaite founder Dan Abrams warned that President Donald Trump’s firing of Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) commissioner Dr. Erika McEntarfer was a “much bigger deal” than some are imagining on Monday.
Trump fired McEntarfer on Friday after an unflattering July jobs report showed just 73,000 jobs added last month and a rise in unemployment to 4.2%, well below expectations.
More damaging were steep downward revisions to previous estimates: May’s job gains were slashed from 144,000 to 19,000, and June’s from 147,000 to just 14,000. Trump accused McEntarfer of acting politically and vowed to appoint “someone who’s going to be honest.”
But Abrams, speaking on his show Monday, called out the charges as “factually inaccurate” and the move as politically reckless.
Pointing to Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard’s claim that the Obama administration plotted to “usurp” Trump by deliberately manipulating intelligence on Russian interference in the 2016 election, Abrams cautioned it was the Trump administration that was “politicizing” the facts. The firing of McEntarfer was another case of that, he added.
“The reality is that they’re fixing what ain’t broke and they are the ones not just politicizing it but marginalizing truth and objectivity, and I care a lot about truth and objectivity as those of you who listen to this show regularly know,” Abrams began.
In defense of the BLS, Abrams said: “You talk to anyone who has had a position like this and they will tell you that they are getting the numbers from elsewhere. They aren’t creating this. It’s not like they’re the chef and they’re putting in all the ingredients, right? It’s more like they’re being delivered the final product and they are basically reviewing and overseeing it.”
“You can’t just manipulate the numbers. But that’s exactly what Donald Trump is claiming with zero evidence. Right?” he added.
“This is crazy stuff that is going to hurt the economy because people won’t believe the numbers,” Abrams added, likening the episode to tactics used by authoritarian dictators like Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe or Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro “in B-rate third world countries.”
Abrams also tied Trump’s ability to “pull” such a move to a broader pattern of compliance in right-wing media.
He said: “This is the sort of thing, the firing of the commission that I don’t think he could have pulled off in the first because there weren’t people like Charlie Hurt sitting in on Fox & Friends pretending as if, ‘oh, it always goes in the same direction.’”
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