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.