Cognitive Dissonance

 Both Richardson and Krugman look at the implications of Trump's firing of the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics because he didn't like the employment numbers. As many have noted, this is a classic authoritarian move, something straight out of 1984:

The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command... And if all others accepted the lie, which the Party imposed, if all records told the same tale, then the lie passed into history and became truth.

It is among the more remarkable ironies that Trump keeps screaming about "communists" in the Democratic Party, when his tactics most resemble Stalinist leanings. Lots of "conservative intellectuals" talk about a march through the institutions that was first suggested by Mao. Still, as we know, every accusation is a confession.

Ultimately, Orwell's statement has been taken to mean that the lies of an authoritarian regime become truth. I'm not sure how accurate that is. Soviet Russia had a ton of black humor about the difference between official statements and reality. In the end, the Soviet Union relied on extremely coercive controls to maintain their grip on power. This weakened them, to the point where the only way forward was to embrace openness, what Gorbachev called glasnost. Something Khrushchev was pushing in the mid-'60s, which is what led to his "retirement."

These closed systems don't work. They might work for a while if you're a New York builder/socialite who can lie and scam his way from one bankruptcy to the next, but the bankruptcies are the important thing. In the end, Trump's lying came face to face with reality, and reality won.

There are certain things we take as being fundamentally true in American politics. Often they are anecdotes that stand in for more complicated concepts. During the 1992 presidential campaign. George H. W. Bush was startled to discover the scanners used at grocery store checkouts. The guy had been Vice President or President for the previous 12 years. Of course he never did his shopping. Yet this became evidence that he was "out of touch" and was a reason he lost the election.

Maybe that's true? Or maybe there were macroeconomic events and the presence for a strong third party candidate that made Clinton's victory possible. 

Trump seems increasingly "out of touch." No figure, for instance, is keeping Epstein in the news than he is. You can fire all the statisticians and economists you want, but people are still noticing that prices for groceries are going up. People are going to notice when the price of manufactured goods goes up.

Trump, being Trump, is going to be SHOUTING IN ALL CAPS that the economy is the best in the history of the galaxy. If that's not true (and I don't think it will be) then that might even get through to the poorly engaged voter, who doesn't follow the news but does know that stuff is expensive.