This week Trump’s autocratic tendencies reached an almost comical level, evoking a “He did what?” reaction even from people otherwise inclined support him: He responded to bad news in the June jobs report by firing the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Don’t like the numbers? Fire the number-crunchers! That’ll fix it.
That firing resembled the moment in his first term when he suggested that the way to deal with accelerating rates of Covid infection was to stop testing. Fewer tests, fewer positive results — problem solved! Such out-of-the-box thinking is what makes Trump a stable genius.
So anyway, the entire federal data-gathering bureaucracy is now on notice that doing your job honestly can get you fired. We’ll see how the bureaucrats respond.
In the meantime, the jobs report actually is bad, and points to the possibility of stagflation, a combination of increasing unemployment and increasing inflation that was widely believed to be impossible until it started happening in the 1970s.
There’s been a lot else going on: The Smithsonian was caught dropping Trump’s impeachments down the memory hole. The Gaza horror continued. Trump encouraged Texas to help him cheat in the 2026 midterms.
But what caught my eye this week was a column in the NYT: “Thinking is Becoming a Luxury Good”. It raised the possibility that what we’ve been seeing lately is just the beginning of a trend: Maybe our culture is producing people fundamentally incapable of self-rule. What happens to democracy in that situation? That led to this week’s featured post “Shaping Ourselves”. That should be out shortly.
The weekly summary, which covers the aforementioned stories plus a few others, should be out by noon EDT.
The Weekly Sift 