On 1 August, Trump controversially directed White House staff to fire Commissioner of Labour Statistics hours after delivering, on schedule, a weak jobs report for July, which additionally included a downward revision for the prior two months, which had previously suggested despite significant market insecurities caused by the tariffs, the One Big Beautiful Bill and immigration restrictions. In a post on Truth Social, Trump, without evidence, accused the commissioner of having ulterior motives to discredit Trump’s success and altered employment figures, moreover that the bureau had distorted job gains ahead of the US presidential election in order to make Harris look more favourable and competent. Neither accusations were true and in fact, Labour also revised downward jobs numbers in September just before the election, the department being staunchly non-partisan and neutral, famous for the anecdote when asked if the glass is half-full or half-empty but rather it is an eight ounce container with four ounces of liquid. Whilst numbers were soft and not aligned with the administration’s expectations, the response was chillingly disproportionate, vowing for transparency and integrity in government data, intimating that career staff will be replaced with Trump appointees (see also). 
Following the unrelenting assault on science—particularly medicine but also weather forecasting and making international students feel unwelcome in American universities, the report would have hardly been newsworthy were it not for Trump’s rather unprecedented move and the knock-on implications in eroded trust in the reliability of this metric as a gauge for economic performance, informing the decisions businesses and investors, including those foreign companies Trump is interested in re-shoring, coerced by the above tariffs. A rosier outlook, timed and recalibrated for political expedience, is the stuff of authoritarian regimes and command-economies and would not instil market confidence. As the US is having its Brexit moment by stoking a potential trade war, there’s a parallel lesson from the recent past in Greece’s eurozone membership (see previously here, here, here and here) when optimistic accounting, overvaluation and outright fraud nearly brought down the whole EU experiment. Individuals’ ability to be hired and runaway inflation will tell the truth, even if the numbers stop being reliable.
Charting on Billboard’s Top 100 during the Republican convention with a concerted write-in campaign for the potential fourth spoiler candidate (Starr ineligible by dent of his being a British subject), it is unclear if their well-organised contingent had any political impact, most fans and supporters of the Beatles’ drummer “who didn’t talk about war” being under the age of twenty-one and not yet able to vote. Perhaps however it did in a small part influence the decision to lower the voting age to that of conscription and Johnson’s later decision not to seek the Democrat nomination for the 1968 election and a second term.
