WILL THE GOP CONTINUE TO PARROT TRUMP’S DESTRUCTIVE LIES?

I have serious questions for my elected officials. President Trump’s firing of the commissioner of labor statistics for announcing that job growth has slowed dramatically is the most recent example of his unchecked assault on our democracy. Authoritarian governments make up statistics to claim their policies are working well. Even when they obviously are not. We have numerous examples of our democracy giving way to authoritarianism under the Trump’s assaults. Firing statisticians. Threatening the heads of newspapers. Launching assaults on universities. Launching assaults on law firms that defend clients that the elected boss finds uncongenial. We keep watching an open assault on truth, the rule of law, and on a free society. And it’s a part of the broader pattern of the transformation of government information into pure propaganda. Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers 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.” Reporting from 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.” For example, officials at the Fed need reliable statistics on inflation and unemployment to inform decisions about interest rates, which in turn affect how much Americans pay for car loans and mortgages. Now Trump is lashing out against the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics because most economists warned that his economic policies would hurt the economy. And the official data is starting to confirm that he was wrong and they were right. Meanwhile 86% of American adults report that the cost of groceries is a source of stress. 53% saying it causes “major” stress. Only 14% of adults say the cost of groceries is not a source of stress for them. On all his key issues Trump is currently underwater. Questions. How far will you go to support the actions and policies of a president whose views do not comport with reality? How far will you go to prop up and make excuses for actions that you know are detrimental to our country’s economic well-being? If we the people are constantly told by the president we cannot believe information that comes out of our government on any metric that he disagrees with how in the world will we continue to exist as America? What will you do to make sure this doesn’t happen?