In any other presidency, two things Trump did today would be so outrageous to both Democrats and Republicans, our representatives in Congress would waste little time protesting the president's actions. But with this presidency, it's just another day in the Office of Sleazy Goings-On for Trump's acolytes.
Outrage #1 was Ghislaine Maxwell being moved to a minimum-security camp in Texas from a regular federal prison in Florida. The move required a waiver of guidelines that prohibit prisoners convicted of serious crimes with more than ten years remaining on their sentence from being in such a camp, which doesn't have any walls or even fences.
Maxwell, of course, was the close associate of pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. She was convicted for helping Epstein groom, traffic and abuse dozens of underage girls.
Since Trump was a good friend of Epstein, a reasonable suspicion is that in exchange for Maxwell making a public statement at some point that she never saw Trump involved with an underage girl, Maxwell's attorney got the Trump administration to agree to transfer her to the minimum-security camp following two days of interviews Maxwell had with Todd Blanche, Trump's previous personal attorney and current deputy director of the Justice Department.
So that's really bad, giving a convicted sex offender a cushy place to serve out her sentence. But since Trump also is a convicted sex offender, I guess it isn't surprising that he wants to make Maxwell comfortable until he decides whether he is going to pardon her, which would be beyond bad.
Trump's other outrage today was firing the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics just because Trump didn't like the employment statistics released today. Those showed that the economy only produced 73,000 jobs in July, with major downward revisions to the employment figures in May and June. Trump didn't provide any evidence for his claim that the statistics were "cooked" to make him look bad. He just said that he had a feeling the numbers were wrong, so he fired the commissioner.
These posts on X, formerly known as Twitter, do a good job of expressing how despicable the firing was.
During the Covid pandemic in Trump's first term, he said that he didn't want to test people for the disease because that would make the number of cases go up. The Idiot in Chief apparently didn't realize that testing just gives an indication of how many cases there are. Testing doesn't produce new cases of Covid, just as Bureau of Labor Statistics figures about job creation don't produce more or fewer jobs.
But Trump's whole approach to life is lie, lie, lie. He constantly seeks to bend reality to his will by saying things that aren't true, though he wishes they were. Problem is, reality always has the last word. If his tariffs cause inflation to rise and job creation to decline, that's a fact. Trump can try to cover up the fact, but the truth wins out in the end.
A big reason why this is the case with employment and inflation figures is that these numbers are crucial for so many people: investors both here and abroad, business leaders, ordinary citizens, policy makers, to name a few. If Trump wants to create a stock and bond market crash, all he needs to do is mess around with Bureau of Labor Statistics reports.
Investor confidence will sink like a stone when it's realized that the Trump administration is just making figures up in an effort to paint Trump's policies in a positive light, even when they're mired in darkness. Fortunately, it seems that the Bureau of Labor Statistics has employees who are dedicated to producing accurate information. Hopefully whistleblowers will do their thing if the new head of the Bureau tries to skew employment and inflation data in a manner that Trump wants.
Discover more from Salem Political Snark
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.