Hello, this is Michael Moss. Heather Cox Richardson is traveling today, and her travel

arrangements did not allow her time to read today's letter, so I will be reading it in her place.

August 4, 2025.

President Donald J. Trump's firing of the Commissioner of Labor Statistics on Friday for announcing that job growth has slowed dramatically, has drawn a level of attention to Trump's assault on democracy that other firings have not.

Famously, authoritarian governments make up statistics to claim their policies are working well, even when they quite obviously are not.

Yesterday, former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers told George Stephanopoulos of This Week on ABC News.

This is the stuff of democracies giving way to authoritarianism.

Firing statisticians goes with threatening the heads of newspapers.

It goes with launching assaults on universities.

It goes with launching assaults on law firms that defend

clients that the elected boss finds uncongenial. This is really scary stuff. In the bulwark,

Bill Crystal called out the open assault on the truth, on the rule of law, on a free society as part of the broader

pattern of the transformation of government information into pure propaganda.

Summer shot down Trump's claim that the commissioner had rigged the numbers in the jobs report

to make him look

bad. These numbers are put together by teams of literally hundreds of people following detailed

procedures that are in manuals, he said. There's no conceivable way that the head of the Bureau

of Labor Statistics could have manipulated this number.

Catherine Ann Edwards at Bloomberg explained the implications of Trump's determination to control

economic statistics. The peril isn't a potential recession. It's losing highly reliable,

accurate, and transparent data on the health of the world's largest economy. As Ben Casman pointed out in the New York Times,

officials at the Federal Reserve, for example, need reliable statistics on inflation and

...