President Donald Trump's recent snap decision to fire the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) could end up blowing up in his face, according to one analyst.
In a Friday essay for the Atlantic, columnist Jonathan Chait wrote that Trump's sacking of BLS commissioner Erika McEntarfer over a less-than-flattering jobs report gives Americans a distinct window into how the second Trump administration governs. Chait wrote that Trump's firing of McEntarfer was an emotionally driven "lizard brain" decision after the July 2025 jobs report showed not only sluggish job growth of just 73,000 new jobs added, but a downward revision of previous jobs numbers by 258,000 — the worst period of job growth since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020. Chait wrote that Trump's reasoning that bureaucrats were scheming to undermine falls apart upon closer inspection.
"Revisions of past numbers are a normal part of BLS methodology. Every monthly report is a projection based on limited information, so the Bureau continues to update its findings," he explained. "Last August, the BLS revised previous months’ job numbers downward. This was obviously a bad thing for the Biden administration, but Republicans decided that it was in fact evidence that the BLS had been cooking the books to make the economy look good."
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According to Chait, McEntarfer's sudden firing can also shed light on Trump's ongoing feud with Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell over Powell's refusal to lower interest rates. He argued that, similar to how Trump lacks an understanding of how the BLS routinely adjusts data, he also fails to grasp why interest rates are lowered in the first place.
The Atlantic columnist pointed out that the Fed typically only lowers interest rates when the economy is struggling, in order to stimulate more economic activity. And when the economy is strong, the Fed keeps interest rates higher as a means of preventing the economy from overheating and causing inflation to spike. After breaking that down, he likened Trump's frustration with Powell as claiming that the economy is stronger than it actually is, while pushing Powell to do things that suggest the economy is weaker than it actually is.
"He is obsessed with propaganda, and has had phenomenal success manipulating the media and bullying his party into repeating even his most fantastical lies," Chait wrote. "But, as Joe Biden and Kamala Harris learned the hard way, voters don’t judge the economy on the basis of jobs reports. They judge it on the basis of how they and their community are doing. You can’t fool the public into thinking the economy is better than it is with fake numbers. All fake numbers can do is make it harder for policy makers to steer the economy."
"The president’s mad rush to subject the macroeconomic policy makers to the same partisan discipline he has imposed on the power ministries is less of a coup than a temper tantrum," he added. "He thinks he wants loyalists and hacks running those functions. He might not like what happens when he gets his way."
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Click here to read Chait's full column in the Atlantic (subscription required).