Trump’s outburst over a bad jobs report is the second-term equivalent of his furious insistence in 2017 that more than a million people attended his inauguration: It’s lying about numbers in an obvious way, but with a much more authoritarian outcome.

President Donald Trump fired the Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Dr. Erika McEntarfer, stating, without evidence, that she falsified job numbers to assist Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 election. Trump then accused her of rigging the numbers this summer, as revisions included a drop of 258,000 jobs.