LEILA FADEL, HOST:
What happens when the president says U.S. government data can't be trusted? President Trump fired the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics in response to a jobs report he didn't like. And yesterday, he insisted the real numbers were actually good.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: We had no confidence. I mean, the numbers were ridiculous, what she announced. But that was just one negative number. All the numbers seem to be great.
MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
The news echoed a moment from his first term when, at a 2017 news conference, then-White House press secretary Sean Spicer was asked why the president touted a positive jobs report after disparaging negative ones.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
SEAN SPICER: I talked to the president prior to this. And he said, to quote him very clearly, they may have been phony in the past, but it's very real now.
(LAUGHTER)
MARTIN: This year, when Republicans were debating a massive tax and spending bill, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said it would add trillions to the deficit. Trump accused the CBO of playing politics.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
TRUMP: CBO, who never gives good - basically, it's a Democrat group. And we're getting tremendous reviews on the bill.
FADEL: Since Trump took office again, we've reported on data scrubbed from websites for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. CDC webpages that track the health of LGBTQ young people disappeared entirely. And elsewhere in today's program, we'll hear about the administration's plans to kill NASA satellites that measure greenhouse gases.
Peter Baker has been following all this, too. He's the chief White House correspondent for The New York Times. Good morning, and thanks for being on the program.
PETER BAKER: Good morning. Thanks for having me.
FADEL: So every administration, Peter, tries to control narratives. Every president spins facts. But you argue that it's different with this president, with this administration. What is different here?
BAKER: Right, exactly. I mean, look; this is not spinning facts so much as changing facts or rejecting facts that are disadvantageous. It would be one thing if a president says, look; these job numbers don't mean that much for this reason or that reason. Here you have a president who's saying the numbers are rigged. They're phony. They can't even be trusted - for no reason. There's no evidence that anything untoward was done with these statistics. He just doesn't like them. He didn't complain about these numbers when the numbers were good. He's only complaining about them when they were bad.
And the difference between this and any other administration is that by firing the person who provides the statistics, you're sending a message to all of government that you better make sure the information you provide is information that the White House is going to like rather than the information that's true. These are agencies that are supposed to be nonpartisan, providing factual information that Republicans and Democrats can use to form policy. They're not supposed to be taking sides. But, in effect, the president, by firing the chief statistician, is saying, I only like the statistics that match my view of reality.
And, of course, this is a president who has long been untethered, let's say, from precise truth. He came to power by telling people that Barack Obama hadn't been born in this country, which wasn't true. When he lost power in the 2020 election, he told everybody, well, that was because there was widespread fraud, he had been cheated, which was not true. But now what he's trying to do is enforce other people to go along with his version of reality no matter how true it might be.
FADEL: Now, you just listed this laundry list of data that's either being questioned or removed entirely. And you recently wrote that these tactics are right out of an authoritarian playbook. Why do you say that? And what do scholars you spoke to say or compare the president's efforts to?
BAKER: Well, they do. And I - look; I reported for four years from Moscow when Vladimir Putin came to power. And there's a long history of this in places like Russia or China, other places where they use data to make arguments that nobody can trust - that because they are perceived to be data that's just simply falsified or massaged or whatever, data that can't be trusted. We get this all the time now when China says what its economic growth is. Nobody really completely knows whether they can trust that or not because it's a government that is willing, we have seen, to play fast and loose with numbers.
And that worry you hear in Washington today is that the United States might be heading down the same track. Authoritarian governments like to control information so they can tell their people or tell themselves that things are better than they really are. But that doesn't mean they actually - they are better. And in fact, you can't convince somebody who's lost a job or who may be paying more at the grocery store that they're not simply because statistics are said to be different. And I think that that's something that we haven't seen in this country in a while.
FADEL: Now, the White House has told us and others that the firing was because this person was totally incompetent, something that no evidence was presented for. But the move, this recent move and the other things you described - has this created a chilling effect on the people who gather and analyze data for the government?
BAKER: Oh, it absolutely has. People understand the message here. They don't even need the White House to tell them at this point that - to do this or that with websites or with the information they have because they know the consequences there. They've seen what's happened to the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and they recognize that they themselves are at risk if they offend the White House.
FADEL: Peter Baker is chief White House correspondent for The New York Times. Thank you for your time and your insights.
BAKER: Thank you. It's good talking to you.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
