Trump shoots the messenger, though not on 5th avenue…and why he gets away with it

If Democrats would stop blaming voters’ bigotry and ignorance for their election losses and pay attention to the legitimate concerns behind the rise of Trump they might better understand why their approval rating is still significantly lower than his.

AI generated image.  Gemini refused to depict
Trump standing on 5th Avenue with a smoking gun.

The president may not have been standing in Fifth Avenue when he metaphorically shot his labor statistics messenger, but close enough.

There is widespread agreement that Trump’s firing of Erika McEntarfer, the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, poses great danger to the future health of the economy. To quote one expert reaction:

If policymakers and the public can’t trust the data—or suspect the data are being manipulated—confidence collapses and reasonable economic decision-making becomes impossible. It’s like trying to drive a car blindfolded. This manufactured chaos will reduce business investment and consumer spending, making a recession—and soaring unemployment—far more likely in coming months.

Trump’s political instincts, however, are almost always better than the reasoned judgement of establishment thinkers like Heidi Shierholz, who wrote that paragraph for the Economic Policy Institute.

How can that be?

A day or so before the commissioner lost her job, journalist Jesse Singal (a liberal journalist) told an interviewer that his reporting on social science research has revealed a disturbing pattern of shoddy methods, ideological bias, groupthink, and outright corruption. Experts, he said, “have screwed up so badly so often”

The crisis in expert authority is a disaster in its own right—we should be able to trust the studies that are published—but one of the knock-on effects of it is it does fuel folks like Trump who take the burn-it-down-approach.

Singal spoke before the firing of Ms. McEntarfer, but he had no trouble coming up with an example of a Trump administrator burning something down: Robert F. Kennedy’s attack on expert vaccine consensus. As if on cue, a week after Singal’s interview, Kennedy announced a $500m cut to  mRNA vaccine research funding.

Singal’s findings turn liberals’ “believe science” lawn sign narrative on its head. In that story, scientists are the heroes. They give us a set of uncontested facts that make our lives better. Those who attack scientific consensus are the villains who are causing the crisis in expert authority, which undermines reasonable decision-making and leads to chaos.

Singal suggests a somewhat different story, in which failings of scientific expertise are at least partially responsible for the “crisis in expert authority.”

And the crisis extends beyond science to every kind of expert in government, education, the media—just about every institution and by extension, democracy itself.  In every case, there is at least some kernel of truth to the sense that experts and institutions have failed us.  And Democrats have become the party that defends the experts and institutions against Trump's attacks on them. 

Meanwhile, Trump has a plan for reviving the middle class that requires attacking those institutions and, in spite of his many blunders, his low approval rating is still significantly higher than the Democrats’.

Democrats could stop blaming voters’ bigotry and ignorance for their losses, acknowledge the failings of elite experts and institutions, and come up with a better plan to restore working class prosperity.

Or they can keep doing what they've been doing and wait for the anti-incumbency cycle to run it's course after Trump’s policies inevitably fail and voters decide they hate the Republican Party even more than they hate Democrats.

Then the party of experts will have a slim majority for a few years until their policies inevitable fail again. 

Notes

This recent Atlantic article offers a list of the ways that Trump is likely to fail. Note to self: read this again in a couple of years to see which of these predictions came true.

It’s Trump’s economy now. The latest financial numbers offer some warning signs (AP, Aug. 2).

Even if Trump manages to revive the manufacturing sector, it's not going to restore middle class prosperity.  Here's why. 

Jesse Singal’s book, “The Quick Fix” focuses on bad science in psychology. 

Here's an example of a left wing party that defeated a Trump-like opposition by admitting past mistakes.