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Historically, the US government has served the American people. Sure, depending on who was in power and what era we are talking about, certain groups were given preferential treatment over others. For example, all administrations have served the needs of rich white men. However, over time, more and more people have benefited from the work of the government. 

Until now. 

Because this administration, this Congress, and this Supreme Court only serve a single individual: Donald Trump.

Now, you might say: “What about all those billionaires who are getting tax cuts they don’t need that are being paid for by millions of Americans losing health and food benefits?” 

A fair point. However, if any of them were to find themselves on the president’s naughty list, then you can rest assured that the power of the US government would come to bear down on them in some manner or another.

Ultimately, if the choice is between what Trump wants and anything else, all three branches of the government seem eager to defer to the whims of the president.

It should go without saying that this is a terrible way to run a country… well, at least unless you want to run it into a ditch. It’s great for that. 

The firing of Erika McEntarfer, the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), is a perfect example. 

As we reported, McEntarfer lost her job because of the president’s refusal to accept reality. In this case, BLS had the audacity to release a report showing that job growth in Trump’s economy has been dismal over the past three months.

Without presenting any evidence, the president predictably claimed that the data was “rigged” and demanded that McEntarfer be fired, even though she has nothing to do with how the information is compiled. 

“The Commissioner does not determine what the numbers are but simply reports on what the data show. The process of obtaining the numbers is decentralized by design to avoid opportunities for interference,” said the group Friends of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which includes BLS commissioners from Democratic and Republican administrations. “The BLS uses the same proven, transparent, reliable process to produce estimates every month. Every month, BLS revises the prior two months’ employment estimates to reflect slower-arriving, more-accurate information.”

But facts don’t matter to Trump, who was irked that the downward revisions of May and June (combined with another subpar performance in July) showed that the economy had only created 106,000 jobs over the past three months, which lags far behind the previous year and contradicts the president’s claim that America is booming. 

And that’s why McEntarfer had to go and will now have to find another job (which will clearly be a challenge in this economy). 

The most ironic aspect of this saga is that it may very well be time to reexamine how BLS compiles its jobs reports because the headline-catching employment figures, which are always published on the first Friday of the month, are often revised afterwards. 

The reason is that the initial numbers are based on a survey of employers while the subsequent revisions (the first one coming a couple of months after the original report was released and another that is published many months later) are compiled using more solid data.

In other words, the report that everybody focuses on is the least accurate.

And those revisions can be substantial, as we saw on Friday, when BLS announced that the economy only created 33,000 jobs in May and June instead of 291,000.

That is a downward revision of more than 85 percent (or, according to Trump-style math, 8,000 percent).

That is a big discrepancy that can have real-life consequences. 

On Wednesday, for example, one of the reasons the Federal Reserve gave for not lowering interest rates was that “labor market conditions remain solid.” 

That may have seemed like the correct assessment based on the initial figures for May and June, but it’s less accurate in light of the revised data. 

So, there is a case to be made for experts to sit down and figure out whether the process needs to change. Perhaps there just needs to be a bigger disclaimer that comes with the initial report, or maybe it needs to be scrapped altogether. Or maybe the data that is used to calculate the revisions needs to be collected more quickly. 

Kevin Hassett, the director of the National Economic Council, said as much. 

“The data has to be something you can trust, because decision-makers throughout the economy trust that these are the data that they can build a factory because they believe, or cut interest rates because they believe,” he said on Sunday. 

But that’s not something that Trump is interested in. He just wants somebody to report data that reflects how he feels about the state of the economy and that makes him look good.

And that is why, ultimately, someone like Hassett will always revert to appeasing the boss. 

He did that, too, on Sunday, when he followed Trump’s lead and hinted at some kind of shenanigans having taken place. 

When he was asked whether the administration had any evidence that the data had been “rigged,” as the president claimed, he responded that “the revisions are hard evidence,” which is a nonsensical thing to say. 

Of course, it’s not as ridiculous as Hassett claiming that the economy is doing great… as long as people just disregard the more accurate BLS figures that show it isn’t.

“While the jobs numbers had this big kind of mysterious revision, if they didn’t have the revision, then the jobs numbers were fully consistent with the 3 percent GDP growth we also saw last week,” Hassett said. 

While that sounds good to the reality-rejecting president, this kind of denialism will harm every American in the long run. 

That, however, seems to be an afterthought for anybody working in the White House these days. 

In his Navigating the Insanity columns, Klaus Marre provides the kind of hard-hitting, thought-provoking, and often humorous analysis you won’t find anywhere else.