A public service for the leader who does not know that blaming the mirror never made anyone prettier
Donald Trump appears to believe that when someone brings him bad news, that person should be fired. This week, after July’s disappointing jobs report showed just 73,000 new jobs and significant downward revisions to previous months, Trump abruptly fired Bureau of Labor Statistics Commissioner Erika McEntarfer. She oversaw numbers he didn’t like. The deep state is everywhere! Sad.
This is a textbook case of shooting the messenger, the age-old mistake of blaming the bearer of bad news instead of dealing with a problem. The phrase is ancient, and the logic behind it has always been deeply and sometimes fatally stupid. If America’s economic data is corrupted, this will not make it great again.
Yet we live in an era when obvious nonsense is no longer universally understood to be bad. So for the benefit of those still uncertain — and perhaps for the person sitting behind the Resolute Desk — Ask Questions Later is forced to offer what can reasonably be called our Idiot’s Guide to Not Shooting the Messenger.
Step 1:
Understand That the Messenger Didn’t Start the Fire
If someone runs into your office and says, “There’s a fire in the break room!” and you respond by firing them for interrupting lunch, you haven’t solved the problem. You’ve just ensured that next time there’s a fire, no one will tell you. That’s where we are now. McEntarfer didn’t create the weak job numbers. She didn’t twist the data. She supervised the standard, bipartisan, methodologically consistent process used by the BLS for decades. That process produced bad news. So Trump, in an act of performative denial, fired the person who oversaw it. He didn’t put out the fire. He fired the alarm.
Step 2: Recognize That Truth Is Not a Loyalty Test
If this feels eerily familiar, it’s because history is full of rulers who treated truth-telling as treason. Socrates was executed by the Athenian state not because he led a coup or committed a crime — but because he made powerful people uncomfortable. His method, the Socratic method, involved asking irritating questions and refusing to accept lazy answers. Athens preferred the comfort of ignorance. Immanuel Kant would call this a failure of moral duty. Kant taught that people must be treated as ends in themselves — never as tools. When you fire a public servant because they delivered inconvenient facts, you’re sacrificing logic and principle and practicality on the altar of ego and politics.
Step 3: Learn From History — the Real Kind
Shooting the messenger is a well-documented, time-honored disaster. Here’s a quick historical sampler:
- In ancient Persia, when King Tigranes heard bad news from a messenger, he had the man beheaded. The result? No one wanted to report bad news ever again. His empire declined in part because he rejected reality.
- In Shakespeare’s “Antony and Cleopatra”, Cleopatra strikes the messenger who informs her of Antony’s marriage to Octavia. The emotional logic is clear — but the consequences are tragic.
- Joseph Stalin, in the 1930s, routinely had meteorologists and economists executed for predicting crop failures. Their forecasts weren’t wrong — but they were politically inconvenient.
- In 2003, the Bush administration sidelined economists at the Army Corps of Engineers for projecting that the Iraq war would be costly and destabilizing. We all know how that turned out.
- Vladimir Putin has repeatedly purged intelligence and military officials who warned about Ukraine being more resilient than one might have expected. That was over three years ago, and led to the catastrophic decision to invade in Feb. 2022. The result: delusion at the top, catastrophe on the ground.
So when Trump fires the BLS chief over job numbers, it’s not just political theater. It’s a move straight from the playbook of rulers who fear reality.
Step 4: Understand the Real-World Costs
Firing a statistician may seem like a niche act of bureaucratic vengeance. But the consequences are large — and lasting. Here’s what happens when you start corrupting official data:
- Markets stop trusting U.S. numbers. If investors believe job reports or inflation data are manipulated, they hesitate. Volatility rises. The dollar weakens. Capital flows elsewhere. America’s economic credibility is a strategic asset — and it’s fragile.
- Policymaking becomes guesswork. Governments use BLS data to set interest rates, adjust social programs, invest in infrastructure, and target training programs. If the data is doctored or politicized, all of those efforts miss the mark. You can’t fix what you won’t measure.
- Whistleblowers stop speaking. If telling the truth gets you fired, why bother? The people who know the most will either lie, stay silent, or leave. That weakens the state — and strengthens disinformation.
- America loses global leadership. The world relies on U.S. data as a gold standard. If we lose that status, we lose influence. And once it’s gone, it’s hard to get back.
- Future presidents inherit a hollowed-out bureaucracy. If every civil servant is expected to serve the president’s ego instead of the public interest, America becomes ungovernable. The next president will have to rebuild trust, personnel, and competence — from scratch.
Step 5: Ask Yourself Who Benefits
In authoritarian regimes, the leader decides what’s true. Facts don’t exist outside his or her narrative. That’s the logic Trump is playing with. As philosopher Hannah Arendt warned, “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction no longer exists.”
That’s the goal of firing the messenger: to muddy the waters. To make truth itself seem political. Once that happens, people stop believing in anything. And in the resulting confusion, only the loudest, angriest, or most power-hungry voices survive.
Step 6: Accept That Grown-Ups Can Handle Bad News
Every president gets bad numbers. Obama got them during the Great Recession. Bush got them after 9/11. Even Biden had rough quarters in 2022. Reacting like a a man who can’t read bad news without throwing a tantrum is not a sign of strength. When you look in the mirror and don’t like what you see, smashing the mirror doesn’t help. It just leaves you with broken glass and the same face, and a reputation as an imbecile which the markets are likely to punish.
It is the road to idiocracy. You will enjoy neither the ride, nor the destination.
