Big McEntarfer
Killing the messenger is an ancient trope; tyrants have been doing it since the beginning of time. David the King in the Books of Samuel occasionally shows signs of being driven by conscience, but even he succumbs to the impulse of the autocrat. When a nameless Amalakite reports the death of King Saul, David orders his men to kill the messenger. Admittedly, the young man is tainted by his origins; all Amalakites are supposed to be slain, but David does not have him killed for that. It is that his news is unbearable to the troubled David, who exorcises his demons in a spasm of violence. If you need the details, they’re in Samuel II.
Now, of course, it is Trump in the spotlight. There is nothing in this story about the death of a king, but rather our infantile president, irritable and demanding, erupting in a tantrum on a federal scale. It’s what happens whenever his diaper is full: a wail of discomfort, loud and penetrating, which requires the ministrations of his cabinet of nursemaids. No high chair is big enough to contain his irritability. No pacifier can stifle his snarls and grunts.
The provocation this time was a set of statistics which put presidential economics in an unflattering light. He wanted us to know that his “deal-making” is effective, that his jabs and feints are producing results. A tariff may be a tax on consumers who will have to bear the burden of the president’s delusions, but for Trump they are the Ring of Sauron, all-powerful artifacts to dominate and control.
The problem is that they have done almost nothing for the economy, and the profile on jobs, published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, shows a meaningful decline between May and July. Not only has Trump pissed off our allies, but he has failed to produce significant growth in the job market.
Then just like that, Trump killed the messenger. The one who actually spoke truth to power, who published the unflattering report on employment, was Erika McEntarfer (Big Mac), commissioner of her agency. When the report came out, Trump fired her immediately. Regrettably, she has disappeared from the story. Universally respected for her skill and efficiency, she has also been lauded for her unimpeachable professionalism. As her colleagues and former bosses have noted, McEntarfer was entirely apolitical and never put her thumb on the scale. In an age committed to the wholeness of victims, McEntarfer deserves to be publicly valorized in any account of this sordid affair.
But the real issue at hand is yet another assault against the fundamental workings of American civilization. What sustains our culture is multivalent authority that centers competence, knowledge, and expertise. Being able to rely on an expert like McEntarfer and the bureau she has headed since January 2024 means that accurate data was widely available and could be used as a sorting hat to separate truth from garbage. Like another branch of government, non-politicized data is part of our system of checks and balances. It ensures that decisions are properly crowd-sourced and that power is never concentrated in a single person, let alone a balding man-child with terminal insecurities and an unquenchable need to be the sole authority.
Such a creature should frighten all of us. Hannah Arendt, the great philosopher of totalitarianism, died before the emergence of Donald Trump. But she described him perfectly when she sketched the tyrant as the one who erases the accumulation of wisdom, the fundamental division between truth and falsehood, and forms of expertise that call his judgment into question. We need to meet our monsters on the electoral battlefield and either prevail or die, with valor in the effort.