Commander in cheat

By firing non-partisan government statisticians and ordering the GOP to rig congressional maps, Trump makes loyalty his essential command

Editor’s note: This newsletter is about facts. It’s about democracy. It’s about strength in numbers — that means numerical data, and people too.

Take an inventory of the news of the last week — heck, the last month — and you will not be reassured about the state of American democracy. This edition unpacks Texas’s five-seat gerrymander and the unprecedented firing of the BLS chief as twin alarms for American democracy. Donald Trump’s quest for final victory and absolute loyalty is now warping both our congressional maps and, maybe soon, even federal statistics.

Independent, data-driven outlets — like this one — have a responsibility to data and the democratic process to describe clearly what’s going on, and why it’s a departure from the normal way our democracy is supposed to work. Standing up for these values comes with a risk of being accused of partisanship, which I accept. As Stephen Colbert used to say, reality has a liberal bias.

Elliott

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There are two stories animating American political journalism this week. The first is the Republicans’ mid-cycle partisan gerrymander in Texas, which would shift 5 seats to the GOP in next year’s congressional elections, and the Democrats’ response to it. (Here’s my analysis of the new map from last Wednesday.)

The second story is President Donald Trump’s firing last Friday of the non-partisan employment statistician heading up the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Trump’s surrogates have said he fired her because the government needs more “accurate” and “transparent” jobs data. They are not fooling anyone. Trump fired the head of the BLS because the BLS jobs report was not good, and because it revised its estimates of job growth in May and June to be much lower — two bad headlines for the president.

I see these two stories as parallel signs of a decaying democracy. I wrote in my newsletter last Wednesday that I am not a partisan Democrat, but I am a partisan for electoral reform. I suppose I am a bit of a partisan for the neutrality of government data, too. In June, I wrote about White House officials blocking the release of new farm data because it showed the trade deficit increasing. The BLS story is just the next step in Trump’s assault on government records that guide policy and our understanding of the world.

These stories are ultimately not just about Trump, but Trumpism. It’s the new ideology of the Republican Party that places loyalty to the party leader at the center of the belief system. The normal rules of politics, elections, and democracy no longer motivate the elites in this party. The thing that matters is that everyone plays according to Trump’s rules — and acts in preservation of his rule.

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Crossing lines

When we look back at this era in history, the gerrymandering story in Texas may turn out to be the tipping point. It is one of the most blatant examples of the loyalty-over-democracy principle that’s guiding Trump through his second term. And he’s not doing it subtly: “No, no, just a very simple redrawing. We pick up five seats,” Trump told a reporter matter-of-factly when asked if he wanted a complete remap before the midterm.

To state the obvious, you don’t actually have a democracy if your leaders can draw whatever district boundaries they want to permanently insulate themselves from electoral accountability. Nothing is stopping Texas — or any number of other states — from redrawing its maps every other year now, each time using the latest available precinct and voter-file data to sort voters into increasingly right-leaning and uncompetitive districts. The current crisis is just the logical end of a system with no partisan guardrails where, instead of voters picking their politicians, politicians pick their voters.

Trump has asked legislators to engage in a non-standard redistricting cycle to give him an edge next year, and they have delivered. That is a sick assault on republicanism. Worried about losing the next election? Just redraw the map and add a few more seats for your team! The electoral connection is so 18th century.

And of course, we can’t forget how Trump behaved last time he lost an election. This is a man who called up the Secretary of State in Georgia and allegedly“asked” for “just 11,000 votes” to tip the state from blue to red.

The through-line from 2020 to 2025 is a disdain for any outcome where Trump (or his party) might lose. Rather than accept losing with grace — a fundamental norm in democracy — Trump insists the rules be changed until he wins. This is the antithesis of the mutual toleration that democracy requires. It treats political opposition as illegitimate and voters as pawns to be shuffled around for one party’s advantage.

In the red? Cook the books!

Trump’s obsession with loyalty also extends to neutral facts and the institutions that produce them. Remember earlier this year when the president used a photoshopped photograph of a tattoo on a legal resident to argue that he was a member of MS-13, and therefore deserved to be deported. And the White House also repeatedly lied about the effects of their budget bill on Medicaid and SNAP.

When reality contradicts the rosy narrative he demands, Trump demands loyalty above factuality. This includes literally who gets to work for the government. On Friday, Trump ranted on social media that “today’s Jobs Numbers were RIGGED in order to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad”. Hours later, the head of the BLS had been terminated.

This was an extraordinary assertion of presidential power over a nonpartisan statistical agency. In America, the integrity of economic data has long been taken for granted – our statistics are considered the “gold standard” worldwide. Nobody asks if China’s GDP statistics are accurate. By all accounts, BLS professionals use transparent, apolitical methods to report things like employment and inflation. They even publish (much of) the survey data they derive their calculations from!

The episode smacks of authoritarian governance. Autocrats frequently dismiss or censor statisticians who report bad news. As Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer put it, “What does a bad leader do when they get bad news? Shoot the messenger.” Trump has made clear that, in his government, loyalty means saying the numbers he wants to hear — even if that means fudging reality. An honest civil servant is deemed a traitor if the data doesn’t flatter the leader. This attitude is poisonous to democracy, which relies on facts being reported plainly and institutions operating at arm’s length from partisan pressure.

I predict we will see a rise in third-party data providers, and an adjustment among media economic reporters in how they talk about government statistics.

If Republicans win in 2028, they will be in charge of carrying out the 2030 Census and making appropriate decennial apportionments. At the rate we’re going, will people even believe the government? For now, we have lots of public data against which we can check the government’s estimates. But what if they don’t release county-level or demographic tallies? After all, the head of the Census reports to Trump.

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MAGA has killed the Republican Party

I think we are witnessing the accelerated collapse of U.S. democracy and America’s standing in the world. This collapse is being furthered in large part by the president and those in his immediate circle. Trump has demanded “five more seats” in Texas and for far more partisan and politically convenient data from the BLS. The people around him have acquiesced.

While Donald Trump is the catalyst for the decline, he is not the only one responsible. Democracy is eroding from the top. Trump fired the head of the BLS because someone told him he could; he asked for more Republican seats out of Texas, and the state GOP has followed his orders.

And there are plenty of other stories with the same lesson: On tariffs, for example, Republicans in Congress have decided to let the president keep playing chicken with the world economy rather than assert their institution’s right to manage trade policy.

Of course, lots of people saw this coming. A lot of political scientists are saying that Trump is now acting like your bog-standard authoritarian, and the party has been so negatively polarized against the opposition that it doesn’t care. Republican party officials, judges, business leaders, etc, have let the president violate the spirit of the constitution and the norms that constrained past executives from capturing and exercising this much power.

The role of the president in our new American imperial system is to consolidate power by putting his people in charge of the game. You can rig an election by changing the district boundaries so that voters have no hope of getting representatives from the opposition party, and by suppressing or changing the official statistics we use to tell stories about the economy.

And to be clear, this is not a question of policy outcomes or political correctness. Democracy is on the line.

In the view of the authoritarian leader, democracy is something to be undermined, a referee to be bribed, not a method by which legitimate opponents can derive power from the people. To Trump, the only legitimate outcome is the one where he comes out on top. Anything that undermines that end is now a threat. That means that he will say that elections are rigged when he’s losing, and that he’ll fire the referees when he’s caught scoring an own-goal. Just like the only legitimate election is one where Trump wins, the only legitimate data now is data that shows him succeeding.

The unified theory of Trumpism is that loyalty to Trump is not simply a product of party competition of political game theory; loyalty to Trump is the ideology. Trump himself is now effectively the entirety of the Republican Party’s platform. If this were not politics, and if American journalists did not have a false pressure toward neutrality, we would call what has happened to the GOP under Trump a personality cult, not a political program. Any policy, principle, or person that conflicts with Trump’s will is disposable. From data to districts, from bureaucrats to ballots, all must serve the Leader or be cast aside. That’s not a party, that’s a cult.

The next party system: just one party?

In 1984, Orwell writes that the Party’s final, most essential command was blind loyalty, to reject the evidence of your own eyes and ears — to believe whatever Big Brother said, even if it was the literal opposite of the truth. For many Americans, that dystopia is no longer fiction. A significant number have been persuaded to disbelieve what they see (be it a lost election, a weak jobs report, or an abusive deportation) and to believe outrageous lies instead, as long as Trump utters them. The only “truth” is loyalty.

If this mentality prevails, America will cease to be a government of laws and become a government of one man’s will. We know how that story ends, and it’s not with liberty or justice for all.

The MAGA prioritization of blind loyalty to Trump is simply not compatible with republican democracy. So the two will not coexist for long. Democracies require acceptance of pluralism, compromise, and reality. Trumpism offers intolerance, absolutism, and factlessness. The two are on a collision course, and unless more people of conscience in the GOP and beyond pull the emergency brake, we may careen past a point of no return.

It’s imperative that defenders of democracy — in both parties — wake up to this reality and reassert that no one is above facts, and country should come before party. Otherwise, as history warns us, the slide toward authoritarianism will only accelerate.

If we are not already past the point of no return, we are rapidly approaching it.