The Enablers of Authoritarianism
In this case, Kevin Hassett, Director of the National Economic Council.
For people like Trump to govern in an authoritarian manner, it takes a host of enablers. The reason why his more dictatorial actions have been more prominent this term is that he learned in his term to surround himself with sycophants. Kevin Hasett, Director of the National Economic Council, proved himself to be one of those sycophants over the weekend.
I will stress, again, that Trump’s firing the head of the BLS because he didn’t like the jobs report was an unambiguously dictatorial thing to do. So much for all that “joking” about being a dictator only on day one!
A couple of things.
First and foremost, the numbers themselves cannot be evidence that the numbers are wrong. Could the number cause additional questions to be asked? Of course. Could the numbers inspire a deeper dive? Sure. But when Trump fired the BLS commissioner the same day that numbers he didn’t like were released, no one can make a credible case that questions over the numbers led to the discovery of a mistake.
We all know that had the numbers been remarkably good that she would not have been fired. Moreover, Trump would have been preeening.
It also seems worth noting that a weakening job market was predicted and can be directly linked to all the economic uncertainty that Trump has been purposefully creating.
Second, Hassett’s dissembling about revisions is disengenuous, but it is a major talking point on the right since the firing. It strikes me as the kind of ex post facto rationalization people often cling to. Let’s face facts, most people pay, at best, passing attention to these numbers (I suspect that a huge percentage of Americans couldn’t say what “BLS” stands for).
Third, Hassett’s reference to Biden-era revisions ignores that rather salient point that the downward numbers can be at a politically inopportune time for Harris (the day before her DNC acceptance speech), so the notion that BLS was doing Democrats some kind of political service is absurd.
On this topic, I would commend Will Saletan’s Bulwark piece, The Banality of Weasel.
In ordinary times, this kind of gamesmanship might be excused as routine spin. But these aren’t ordinary times. Trump isn’t just blaming BLS. He is decapitating it, telling the public to ignore it, and sending a message to everyone in government that any release of unwelcome information might end their careers. The president who tried to overthrow an election is now threatening to undercut or destroy—with similar accusations of “rigging”—any institution that could document his failures or malfeasance.
This is the project Hassett has joined. In four interviews since McEntarfer was fired, he has endorsed her termination. “All over the U.S. government, there have been people who have been resisting Trump everywhere they can,” Hassett declared on CNBC. “To make sure that that’s not going to happen in the data agencies,” he went on, “we’re going to get highly qualified people in there that have a fresh start and fresh eyes on the problem.”
As Saletan notes, Hassett’s motivation is, no doubt, to please Trump so that maybe, just maybe, he can be Jerome Powell’s replacement as Fed Chair.
More evidence of his weasley ways here:
And, especially, this attempt to defend the indefensible regarding Brazil (while both admitting what it is and also pretending like it is also some vague something else).
One more for the road: a bizarre dodge on AI (wherein he suggests AI will help workers better put nuts on bolts). Also, his chess example would suggest that AI could replace both grandmasters and coaches. How that leads to more jobs is beyond me. Also, increased productivity of existing workers can depress the need for more employment.
********************@
I think all this gets at Trump’s narcissism and egoism. It’s a consistent pattern of behavior – he doesn’t like anything or anyone that makes him look bad. Shooting the messenger definitely fits that IMO.
@Andy:
He should start with himself for looking, talking, and acting like that.
But that would be so un-narcissistic, it would make him look bad.
This is Kevin Hassett in a nutshell (story was in Business Insider from May, 2020):
White House economic adviser Kevin Hassett created a baffling ‘cubic model’ showing coronavirus deaths would hit 0 by May 15. It turns out he used a basic Excel function for his controversial projection.
In other words, a person with training in science, much less communicable disease statistics, decided that he would look at some data and use a canned Excel function to fit a curve. This idiot’s projections was one of the pieces of “data” used by Trump to let everyone know that Covid wasn’t a real threat. Hassett isn’t just a pathetic toadie, he has blood on his hands.
Remember the 1999 book Dow 36000? Coauthored by Kevin Hassett. Predicted the Dow would reach 36,000 by 2004. It reached 36,000 in November 2021. The book was described as the “most spectacularly wrong investing book ever“.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dow_36,000
@Lucys Football:
@Scott:
So Bad Stats Hassett should be a shoo-in for Trump’s next Bureau of Labor Statistics chief.
@Lucys Football: @Scott: I remember both, but forgot (or never paid attention) to the fact that it was Hassett.
Ugh.
@Steven L. Taylor: The man has a very long history of dishonesty; it’s important to start with that.
The naked emperor expects/demands his subjects praise the magnificence of his raiment.
While I don’t object to the discussion of Hassett and his lies here, I think overall it’s best to just ignore the phony stories the enablers come up with, and stick to our story, using simple, punchy language.
Such as is used here: Trump fired the head of BLS because he didn’t like the numbers and wanted to throw doubt on them. There’s no other reason. He’s trying to build an Empire of Lies. These things always collapse. Always. In this case, though, he’s going to take us with us, and I want off this ocean liner. I need the navigators to tell us when there are icebergs ahead.
I think there’s a separate element of this interview that lays bare the absence of any cogent emergency supporting the president’s authority to impose tariffs directly without aid of Congress. The whole mumbledy jumble of why we are imposing 50% tariffs on Brazil, a country we have had a trade surplus with for nearly two decades. If the economic emergency doesn’t answer the question the political emergency of Trump’s buddy Bolsinaro does. In Hassett’s explanation (using that term loosely), we have to get American jobs back except (even though there are none to get back) Brazil has political problems and, yeah, those are either the same emergencies or different ones. But, yeah, President Trump!
Hassett is far from the worst of Trump’s minions, and yet for some reason every time I see him I want to punch him. (And I don’t think I’ve actually ever punched anyone in my life…) Maybe it’s the ingratiating smile he keeps plastered on his mug as he runs through an endless litanies of what are not only lies, but lies that both he and the interviewer know are lies.
Or maybe he just has a really punchable face…
For me these last ten years of Trump have shown me that everyone who serves Trump is eventually going to be forced to sell-out or get out. Trump corrupts, ruins reputations.
Look at Bill Barr, he bailed out just in time, just before random DC tourists attacked the Capitol on January 6th, and Gary Cohn (an Economic Advisor) helped get the big 2017 tax cut through, then put up with the animosity of Peter Navarro and Steve Bannon for two years before he bailed too.
Kevin Hassett? He’s loving the radical right takeover of Washington, and he, like hapless cabinet secretaries and agency heads, is willing to say ANYTHING to keep momentum of the takeover going.
Scott Bessent? I think he’ll stay until Trump ousts Jerome Powell, or Powell survives until his term ends, and Trump will nominate him (or Hassett or Navarro) to head up the Federal Reserve.
@al Ameda:
If El taco sacks Powell and the economy goes south, whom will there be left to blame but Bessent?
The final report on the Titan disaster came out this week. Reading it I can’t help but see the similarities with El Taco’s so-called administration. In brief, there’s hubris, and then there’s idiot hubris. Or, as Krugman put it today in his substack, El Taco is engaged in an economic reign of error.
@Kathy:
I can’t really disagree with you very much. However if timing is that the economy goes south before Powell’s term is up, then Trump will surely blame and fire Powell, and Bessent is probably first in line. Whatever, it will be all chaos-all-the-time.
but one thing is certain, Trump will not be blamed, nor will he suffer any consequences owing to the damage of his various vanity projects (i.e, tariffs)
@Scott:
I do remember hearing of the book Dow 36,000 when it came out in 1999, but had no idea it was coauthored by Kevin Hassett. It’s hard to overstate how wrong the book’s premise was, as it took 11 years for the Dow just to hold above the level it had been when the book was published. And TIL from @Lucys Football of the ‘cubic model’ that Hassett devised to predict coronavirus deaths going to zero.
Now it all makes sense. An economist with major credibility issues ended up in the trump1 administration where he further undermined his credibility, and then naturally ended up in the trump2 administration where he is vying for a key government position.
Australia has had a free trade agreement with the USA for 10 years. Imports from America come in duty-free. The US enjoys a 100%+ trade surplus with Australia. On Trump’s “logic” America has been ripping us off for years. That didn’t stop him imposing a 10% tariff in Australian imports, shortly to become 15% if reports are true.
It’s become increasingly clear Trump’s tariffs are little more than a crude means of extorting tribute from other countries for the benefit of Trump personally. Here he is describing his deal with the EU, or rather the deal he imagines he has (the Europeans don’t agree with him):
PRESIDENT TRUMP: Yeah, well there are no details. The details are $600 billion to invest in anything I want. Anything. I can do anything I want …
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/08/05/cnbc-transcript-president-of-the-united-states-donald-trump-speaks-with-cnbcs-squawk-box-today-.html
It must be quite a talent to support all of the administration’s lies and absurdities during these interviews without feeling physically ill. A more relatable response would be this (Comedy Central), where Kevin Hassett, or perhaps comedic actor Andy Daly, is the character Forrest MacNeil after eating 15 pancakes.
Hassett’s uncanny resemblance to Colin Robinson, the energy vampire in What We Do In The Shadows, doesn’t help things.
@Lucys Football:
This story buried the lede — the problem is not that he did it in Excel using a canned function. The problem is that he fit a cubic polynomial to the data and used it for forecasting. Every data scientist in the world knows that, whatever the true underlying form of the data generating process might be, it isn’t a cubic polynomial. Ever. With a cubic, you’re either overfitting a simpler trend or misfitting a non-polynomial process.