The Despot's Guide to Job Statistics

Dictators routinely lie about economic growth. Trump just took a page from their playbook in appointing an unqualified, Nazi-admiring, January 6th hack to run the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

“Warmly Hail the Successful Opening of the 4th People's Congress,” Chinese Propaganda Poster (1971)

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In 1787, when Catherine the Great visited Crimea, Grigory Potemkin, her former lover and field marshal, decided to spruce things up to impress her. It is said that he constructed fake little charming villages, decorated facades, using cheap and quick ways to ensure that Catherine’s view was exclusively idyllic, even if the reality behind was rotten. (While historians tend to agree that these accounts were exaggerated—and possibly fabricated—the term stuck.)

A Potemkin village is an elaborate but hollow construction, aimed to flatter and deceive in equal measure, to put lipstick on a pig, so that everyone can save face and nod along with the lie.

In 2013, when Vladimir Putin planned to visit Suzdal, a town 150 miles northeast of Moscow, local officials worried at the prospect of disappointing the despot with dilapidated buildings. In a modern revival of Potemkin’s alleged deception, they slapped exterior wallpaper onto buildings, hoping to make them look charmingly brand new, a comforting myth, a pretend world that, for a brief moment, was easier to live in than the real one. (Putin never showed up).

Last week, Donald Trump began his own Potemkin construction—not on a new Trump Tower—but on a facade of lies with far greater consequence for the economy of the United States and the rest of the world. And it’s not subtle: the man who Trump has tapped to produce key economic statistics is an unqualified right-wing hack with a longstanding admiration for Nazi warships who just so happened to be at the US Capitol on January 6th, 2021.