“Se non è vero, è ben trovato” — alleged Italian expression
There’s a strong connection between the lingering, radioactive Jeffrey Epstein saga and Donald Trump’s sacking of Erika McEntarfer, the Bureau of Labor Statistics executive ousted for revealing that jobs growth in the United States has slumped this year in the face of Trump’s economic chaos. The connection goes beyond the fact that Trump is still looking for distractions from the growing threat that Americans will learn more details of his close friendship with his fellow sexual predator Epstein — and, specifically, Americans who enthusiastically voted for Trump in the belief that a sinister elite cabal controlled the United States, and among their crimes was sexual abuse of children.
All this suggests that if you’re going to exploit conspiracy theories about elite plots for political advantage, it’s best to try to avoid ones about actual conspiracies you might be involved in. As Crikey has long observed, while Trump might cosplay at being some sort of political outsider, he’s as elite as they come — even if far more vulgar and arriviste than other members of the US east coast set.
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It also suggests a difficult problem for those who successfully exploit conspiracy theories for political benefit: you can’t just bring them all to a halt once you’re in office yourself. Indeed, once you’re in power, you have no further excuses. Why not release all the files — whether the files are on aliens, the JFK assassination or Epstein’s crimes, or the global high-speed tunnel/pizza parlour network that allows trafficking of children by bloodthirsty elites?
The answer — one that Trump excels at — is distractions, a flurry of which emerged from the White House as Trump tried to get people to look away from the Epstein scandal. And among the distractions were conspiracy theories about Barack Obama and Russiagate.
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That is, in response to the now-inconvenient persistence of a well-established conspiracy theory Trump exploited, he is trying to push his own preferred conspiracy theories, a kind of elite, top-down imposition of conspiracy theories when the most successful theories are ones grown in the rich, fertile soil of the minds of ordinary Americans. The Obama-as-traitor theory is the Trump Steaks of conspiracy theories; a shitty, indigestible lump of gristle being flogged in the hope Trump’s name will get it going, but which will struggle to compete with more authentic products.
The sacking of McEntarfer is another Trump Steak, a kind of Deep State-goes-nerdy idea that sinister bureaucrats are distorting the numbers to hide the evidence that Trump’s economic policies, rather than lifting inflation, unemployment and the deficit, are heralding a golden age. Many have pointed out how Orwellian it is for an autocrat to get rid of a source of credible independent information about their performance; sacking McEntarfer is a kinder, gentler version of Stalin having the Soviet statistics bureau shot for revealing that famine had killed millions of Ukrainians.
It goes a little further than that, however. Trump’s entire political business model is based on fostering and exploiting white resentment and a sense of grievance about the existing political, economic and cultural system that they see — despite their persistent privilege — as inimical to their interests. The engine room of MAGA Republicanism is what people feel, not what is real. And they must always be made to feel anxious, frightened, angry, resentful. There must always be another enemy to denounce and purge, and urgently too.
But this privileging of emotion over reality, of what ought to be over what is, must always be at odds with any ostensibly independent account of what is really happening. Any independent, expert-based assessment of what is going on in America is inconsistent with Trumpism. It must be Trump — the embodiment of the popular will — who determines what is real, not some “expert” who is definitionally out of touch with popular feeling, and therefore immediately suspect.
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What Trump believes is real constantly changes, of course, especially as his cognition declines with age, but that’s of no moment — consistency doesn’t matter any more than evidence. Moreover, any opinion that differs from Trump’s is not merely immediately false, but potentially traitorous, because Trump is the avatar of the people. To offer a disagreeable fact is effectively to spit in the face of Americans.
This is why Trump goes much further than Karl Rove, Dick Cheney or whoever it was who, in the Dubya years, asserted a contrast between the “reality based community” and the American empire which created its own realities. For Trump, it’s not a matter of international statecraft, it’s an entire way of being. He recognises no reality based community — his is the reality based community, and he determines with that reality is.
Statistics are thus a particular problem, because they purport to measure the real consequences of Trump’s decisions, and not what Trump feels ought to be true. In Trump’s America, the line about lies, damned lies and statistics rings louder than ever. In this context, McEntarfer is lucky she lasted as long she did. Other adherents of how things really are, rather than how Trump wants them to be, should take heed of her example.
