The Banality of Weasel
Donald Trump’s top economist isn’t necessarily a dumb man. He’s just not a strong one.
Yesterday, the president of the United States appeared without explanation on the roof of the White House, walked aimlessly for a bit, shouted back-and-forth with reporters, said some hard-to-interpret things about nuclear weapons, gesticulated oddly, and then left. Happy Wednesday.
Kevin Hassett, Spineless Wunderkind
by Will Saletan
Kevin Hassett, the director of the National Economic Council, seems like a decent fellow. He chats amiably with reporters at the White House. He speaks respectfully of Democrats and progressives. Dozens of economists, including veterans of Democratic administrations, vouched for him in 2017 when he was nominated to serve as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers for Donald Trump.
The other day, a classmate reminded me that Hassett overlapped with us when we were students at Swarthmore College. It’s a small Quaker liberal arts school, the opposite of a MAGA factory. I probably met Hassett there. Since then, I must have talked to him at one or two think-tank receptions.
He’s not the sort of guy you’d expect to join in an authoritarian purge. But that’s precisely what he’s done.
On Friday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that job growth during Trump’s term was lower than previously estimated. Trump responded by firing the bureau’s commissioner, Erika McEntarfer. He claimed, baselessly, that the numbers were “rigged,” and he falsely alleged that the bureau had waited until after the 2024 election to issue a similar revision of job numbers under Joe Biden.
Hassett knows the bureau isn’t partisan. He also knows it revised Biden’s job numbers two and a half months before the 2024 election—not afterward, as Trump pretended. In fact, BLS delivered the bad news about Biden’s numbers on August 21, 2024, in the middle of the Democratic convention. That was the day before Kamala Harris delivered her acceptance speech. The timing for Democrats couldn’t have been worse.
So when Hassett appeared on two TV shows this Sunday and was pressed about Trump’s allegations, he could have told the truth. Or he could have ducked the questions. Instead, he joined in the smear campaign.
On Meet the Press, Kristen Welker asked Hassett whether he had evidence that the BLS numbers were “rigged.” Hassett said yes. The “hard evidence,” he told Welker, was that the revision of Biden’s numbers “came out after he withdrew from the presidential campaign” on July 21, 2024. Hassett said this was part of “a bunch of patterns that could make people wonder” about the bureau’s trustworthiness.
On Fox News Sunday, Shannon Bream asked Hassett about Trump’s claim that the BLS numbers were “phony.” Hassett said the bureau’s revisions naturally made people “wonder if there’s a partisan pattern in the data.” To illustrate this concern, he noted again that the 2024 revision wasn’t released “until after Joe Biden had dropped out.”
Hassett knew Biden’s withdrawal was irrelevant. By August 2024, Harris was the candidate. If the bureau had wanted to help her, it would have withheld the revision until after the election.
So why did Hassett focus on Biden’s withdrawal? Because it happened before the revision came out. Hassett wanted to justify Trump’s accusation that BLS had withheld the revision for partisan reasons. So he changed the reference point from the election to the withdrawal.
Hassett’s argument makes no sense. According to him, an agency supposedly filled with partisan Democrats held off on reporting bad news because they wanted to prop up Biden—but then it reported the bad news at a time that maximized the political pain for Harris. Was the bureau secretly the epicenter of the “We’re with Joe” movement? Who knew!
After the Sunday shows, critics chastised Hassett. On reflection, he could have abandoned his ploy. But on Monday, when CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin pointed out that the 2024 revision preceded the election, Hassett repeated the same maneuver. The revision “was after Joe Biden had withdrawn,” Hassett told Sorkin. He concluded, “It’s a massive failure of our data agencies to be making willy-nilly changes that are difficult to understand and often have apparently partisan patterns.”
In ordinary times, this kind of gamesmanship might be excused as routine spin. But these aren’t ordinary times. Trump isn’t just blaming BLS. He is decapitating it, telling the public to ignore it, and sending a message to everyone in government that any release of unwelcome information might end their careers. The president who tried to overthrow an election is now threatening to undercut or destroy—with similar accusations of “rigging”—any institution that could document his failures or malfeasance.
This is the project Hassett has joined. In four interviews since McEntarfer was fired, he has endorsed her termination. “All over the U.S. government, there have been people who have been resisting Trump everywhere they can,” Hassett declared on CNBC. “To make sure that that’s not going to happen in the data agencies,” he went on, “we’re going to get highly qualified people in there that have a fresh start and fresh eyes on the problem.”
Why is Hassett parroting Trump’s propaganda and facilitating his corruption? The simplest theory is that he’s under consideration to replace Jerome Powell as chair of the Federal Reserve, and he doesn’t want to offend Trump. But that’s exactly why Hassett shouldn’t get the job. We can’t trust a Fed chairman who has already demonstrated his willingness to betray his colleagues and mislead the public on the president’s behalf.
The larger lesson runs deeper here. None of us should be surprised when a heel-clicking zealot like Stephen Miller does whatever the boss wants. But when a friendly wonk like Hassett goes along, that’s a warning. It shows how easily a mild-mannered bureaucrat, just by resorting to political spin in the context of a purge, can become a cog in an authoritarian machine.
An HHS Secretary Neither Safe Nor Effective
by Benjamin Parker
The Department of Health and Human Services yesterday announced that it was giving up on the greatest medical miracle of the century.
Rewind back to spring 2020: The coronavirus is spreading around the world. Efforts to contain it are ineffective. People are dying at an alarming rate. Hospitals are overwhelmed. In cities around the country, bodies lie in refrigerated trailers because local morgues are overflowing. If you look up coronavirus, one of the cool facts you can find about it is that there has never been a successful vaccine developed for any virus in the family. Ever.
That changed because, quietly, some scientists had been working on a new kind of vaccine that worked according to a radical new mechanism: Rather than teaching the body to fight a weakened or inactivated form of a virus, as older vaccines did, this vaccine would teach the body to attack and kill just one part of the virus, the spike protein.1
Using this technology—and an unprecedented effort by the U.S. government and some of the world’s leading drug companies—there was a safe, effective COVID vaccine by the spring of 2021. Then there were three. Donald Trump was deeply proud of this achievement.
And why wouldn’t he be? mRNA vaccines promised to deliver life-saving protection against a host of viruses that previously had no antidotes. The government invested a ton of money into developing them.
That is, until yesterday. HHS “is terminating 22 mRNA vaccine development investments because the data show these vaccines fail to protect effectively against upper respiratory infections like COVID and flu,” the department announced. One of the projects being canceled was aiming to develop an mRNA vaccine for H5N1—a.k.a bird flu, considered a potential future pandemic agent.
“We’re moving beyond the limitations of mRNA and investing in better solutions,” HHS Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr. said. “We’re shifting that funding toward safer, broader vaccine platforms that remain effective even as viruses mutate.”
That’s rich coming from the guy who also said that “there’s no vaccine that is, you know, safe and effective.” Kennedy, of course, was always going to act on those long-held anti-vaxx instincts. The responsibility of this ultimately rests with Trump for abandoning his one-time praise of Operation Warp Speed and placing a crank in this post.
AROUND THE BULWARK
America Is Blinding Itself… In a dangerous world, downsizing our intelligence agencies is shortsighted and dangerous, warns GEN. MARK HERTLING.
Do We Know What Time It Is? On Just Between Us, WILL SALETAN and MONA CHAREN discuss the authoritarian power grabs of the past week and consider whether, in some situations, it's the right time to break norms.
Donald Trump, Master Statistician… Whatever the claim, the president has the numbers to prove it, even if he has to make them up, observes BILL LUEDERS.
Is the Economy the Biggest Political Threat to Trump? Voters in the seven swing states that put Trump back in office believed he would fix the economy. But as he keeps making it worse, the cornerstone of his appeal is crumbling. CHUCK TODD joins TIM MILLER to discuss that and explore how a revitalized local news media might help restore national trust.
Quick Hits
YOU DO NEED A WEATHERMAN TO TELL WHICH WAY THE WIND BLOWS: One of the many government agencies that DOGE cut in its furious quest for “savings” was the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the nation’s meteorologists. These cuts were widely decried as soon as they were made because, for obvious reasons, mankind has long had an interest in monitoring the weather. But the decision to slash staff came under extra scrutiny after last month’s deadly floods in Texas, which killed more than 130 people. It’s not clear that the floods would have been less damaging without cuts to the National Weather Service, which is part of NOAA. But there were vacancies at the weather forecast station nearby.
As the peak of the Atlantic hurricane season approaches, some of the DOGE cuts at NWS are being reversed. CNN reports:
The National Weather Service has received permission to hire 450 meteorologists, hydrologists and radar technicians just months after being hit hard by Department of Government Efficiency-related cuts and early retirement incentives.
The new hiring number includes 126 new positions that were previously approved and will apply to “front-line mission critical” personnel, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration official told CNN.
As with all things DOGE, it’s not clear that there was any significant boost to efficiency—or even any savings at all. In fact, it seems pretty likely that in this case, Elon cost money and risked lives.
DOWN ON THE FARM: Donald Trump is encountering a problem familiar to many autocrats: His policies are inimical to his goals, contradictory with one another, or both.2 This includes mass deportations, which are going to hurt manufacturing . . . and also make inflation worse. So, what’s Trump to do?
He’s once again considering a carve-out from his mass deportations for farm workers. Politico reports:
Trump said that his administration will continue to deport criminals but that he wants to “work with” farmers to find a solution for their workers, oftentimes immigrants who have lived in the country illegally for decades and are paying taxes. He suggested the White House was working on a touchback program for some workers, requiring them to leave the U.S. and reenter through a legal pathway, an idea that faces strong opposition among immigration hawks who view exceptions for one industry as a slippery slope.
Two months ago, Trump briefly floated a deportation exemption for farms as well as the hospitality industry before quickly changing his mind. Which raises a second problem with government by the whim of one old man: If farms can’t know with some degree of confidence how much labor they’re going to be able to hire to bring in the harvest, how are they supposed to know how much to plant?
UN-STRATEGIC NARCISSISM: Donald Trump has delegated one part of his multi-prong quest for a Nobel Peace Prize to Steve Witkoff, a long-time real estate developer and associate of Trump’s. Witkoff is the president’s special envoy for peace missions. And his diligent work in that role finds him today in Moscow, where he concluded a three-hour meeting with Vladimir Putin—his fifth such meeting this year.
There is no reason to expect any results from the tête-à-tête, except possibly an imminent barrage of drones and missiles on some Ukrainian cities.
But it’s not really Witkoff’s fault that he can’t make peace between Russia and Ukraine. It’s Trump’s fault.
While the president’s paeans to peace are better than the alternative, he came into office apparently believing that the world’s problems could be solved by the force of his personality alone. He never offered a plan—or even concepts of a plan—to make peace in Ukraine or in Gaza or anywhere else. He just promised to do it, often on extraordinary timelines: in the first hundred days of his administration, on the first day of his administration, even before taking office!
It shouldn’t be surprising that Trump’s theory of peace aligns perfectly with his theory of why these wars began in the first place: It’s all about him. He has repeatedly asserted, with no evidence, that neither the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 nor the October 7th attacks in Israel would have happened if he had been in office.
Trump’s former national security advisor, Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster, popularized Hans Morganthau’s concept of “strategic narcissism”: the “tendency to view the world only in relation to the U.S.” We may need a new term for a kind of narcissism that assumes the world’s problems are about one individual.
Cheap Shots
Correction, August 6, 2025, 10:55 a.m.: An earlier version of this newsletter inaccurately stated that the mRNA vaccines trained the body to attack mRNA in viruses, rather than training it to attack the spike proteins for which mRNA codes.
We were discussing this problem in the comments section of a recent Morning Shots. If you’re not in the comments, consider joining!
My husband had stage 4 melanoma. He was dying before our eyes. In a Hail Mary, his doctors at MGH Boston got him into a Phase 1 drug trial using a personalized mRNA cancer vaccine. He was cured. Not in remission. Cured. That was in 2019. All of these mRNA cancer trials are now being canceled by these evil morons, taking hope away from families like mine. These is so much blood on their hands.
I don't mean to quibble, but I am a biologist, and I think it's absolutely a requirement that the most accurate information about the mRNA vaccine be expounded. Ben Parker is correct that the COVID mRNA vaccine trains the human immune system to fight a specific feature of the virus. However, it does not train itself against the mRNA that is injected. What happens is that the mRNA in the vaccine mimics our own messenger RNA (mRNA), but it codes for an important chunk of the spike protein that is on the surface of the virus. The human machinery translates this mRNA just as it translates its own mRNA to produce this benign protein and only this protein, and the immune system then trains itself against the produced spike protein. Nothing could be safer.