A Gaggle of Goldbricks
One of the main vehicles by which the press gets answers from the president is the “gaggle”—an ad hoc gathering of reporters and cameras, often occurring as he’s en route to or from the White House. It’s a perfect setting for Donald Trump, because he is skilled at parrying with the press, because the events generate viral clips, and, most important, because journalists often collapse into their roles as bit actors in the president’s drama.
For an example, let’s go back to Friday, August 1. At 8:30am—as happens on the first Friday of every month—the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported the previous month’s employment numbers. They weren’t pretty: just 73,000 jobs created in July, along with an unusually sharp reduction of 258,000 jobs in May and June.
As politicians are wont to do, Trump sought to shift the blame. As authoritarians are wont to do, he attacked the civil servants who report the numbers. He quickly fired the bureau’s commissioner, Erika McEntarfer, claiming that she messed up the latest report and had also skewed the numbers last year to hurt his reelection chances: “On November 15, 2024, right after the Election,” he stated on Truth Social, “the Jobs Numbers were massively revised DOWNWARD, making a correction of over 818,000 Jobs—A TOTAL SCAM.”
Trump is wrong. The BLS did report a downward revision of 818,000 jobs, but that happened in August—during the Democratic National Convention and almost three months before the election. That seems like a nice boost for Trump’s campaign.
You might hope that, armed with such an obvious set of lies, our White House press corps would have been prepared, later Friday, when Trump appeared before the gaggle. But no. Asked about McEntarfer’s firing, the president said, “Right after the election, I think on the fifteenth, November 15, she had an eight- or nine-hundred-thousand-dollar [sic], massive reduction. Said she made a mistake.” Trump repeated his false claim and took at least a dozen more questions from the faceless, braying herd. But no reporter challenged him on that point, one that underlies his rationale for taking this unprecedented step.