Morning Joe ridicules GOP for justifying Trump’s firing of Labor Stats chief: ‘Put on their Baghdad Bob hat’

The hosts of MSNBC’s Morning Joe mocked Republicans and White House officials on Monday for spending the weekend attempting to justify Donald Trump’s decision to fire the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics following a poor jobs report last week.

According to anchor Joe Scarborough, it appeared that the president’s aides and top loyalists knew the assignment and “put on their Baghdad Bob hat” in an effort to defend the impetuous move, knowing they didn’t have a choice because “there was no justification for” the termination.

On the same day that Trump resumed his global tariffs, which could potentially spark inflation and lead to reduced economic growth, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the U.S. economy added only 73,000 jobs in July. Furthermore, there was a massive downward revision in the previous two months, showing that only 33,000 jobs were added rather than the previously reported 291,000.

With the president routinely declaring that the U.S. is the “HOTTEST” country in the world and the economy is booming, the disappointing jobs report prompted Trump to lash out at BLS commissioner Erika McEntarfer. Trump accused her of manipulating and rigging the statistics to make him look bad, because former President Joe Biden nominated her. The president then fired McEntarfer Friday evening.

While some GOP lawmakers expressed concern that Trump appeared to terminate McEntarfer just because he didn’t like the numbers, noting that she was overwhelmingly confirmed by the Senate last year, Cabinet members and top White House advisers spent the Sunday shows desperately scrambling to spin their boss’ move.

“The president wants his own people there so that when we see the numbers, they’re more transparent and more reliable,” National Economic Council director Kevin Hassett said on NBC’s Meet the Press.

“You want to be able to have somewhat reliable numbers,” White House trade representative Jamieson Greer declared on CBS News’ Face the Nation. “There are always revisions, but sometimes you see these revisions go in really extreme ways. And it’s, you know, the president is the president. He can choose who works in the executive branch.”

During Monday’s broadcast of Morning Joe, Scarborough brought up the latest op-ed from the Wall Street Journal editorial board, which took aim at the president’s economic advisers for being the “bureau of labor denial” following McEntarfer’s firing.

“The reality of slowing job growth is clear to anyone paying attention, no matter the official statistics,” the board wrote. “Mr. Trump’s data denial is one more reason fewer Americans will trust the government.”

Scarborough claimed that while Beltway insiders like himself are generally able to get White House officials to give them “straight answers” during off-the-record chats on Trump’s decision-making, he considered this an “exception to that rule” before outright mocking their weekend performance.

“Everybody put on their Baghdad Bob hat this weekend because there was no justification for it,” Scarborough said. “I was surprised that I didn’t even get the sort of quiet eye rolling from inside the White House. I guess they understood they were going to follow the Baghdad Bob line, and they all did it this weekend.”

The Morning Joe star was referring to Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf, Saddam Hussein’s former Minister of Information at the outset of the Iraq War, who was given the “Baghdad Bob” nickname due to the comically false statements her would make in press conferences.

Al-Sahhaf once claimed American soldiers were dying by suicide “by the hundreds”, and denied that American tanks were in Baghdad – despite the fact that the tanks could be heard in the distance and were only a few hundred meters from where he was speaking.

“Those in the White House, those close to the president, were in lockstep – asserting, without evidence, that there was bias in these job numbers and that President Trump was simply justified in doing what he did,” Morning Joe co-host Jonathan Lemire said Monday. “None of that is true. This is a bad one. Historically, this is a bad one.”

He added: “Governments, economies, and businesses can only make decisions based on hard data, on statistics. This calls into question so much of what Washington produces.”

Elsewhere on the program, Scarborough said that a “lot of people are certainly deeply concerned” that this latest move from Trump shows that he’s “playing with the facts” and that it could result in the “rise of authoritarianism.” Regular contributor Katty Kay, meanwhile, observed that the U.S. could be “going more in the direction of Latin America” and devolve into a “feudal oligarchical system.”

Over on the other cable news outlets, CNN senior reporter Matt Egan suggested that Trump’s firing of McEntarfer would be similar to “an NFL owner who responds to his team losing big by immediately firing the scoreboard operator.”

Moments later, CNN global economic analyst and Financial Times editor Rana Foroohar sounded the alarm over what this termination could mean for the country down the road.

“I mean, you know, this is the same bureau and the same commissioner that he was lauding when good numbers came out. And now the bad numbers are coming out. He‘s firing them,” she said.

“And I think one thing that really worries me is that this is what you see in autocracies,” Foroohar continued. “This is what you see in emerging markets that don‘t have the rule of law, that don‘t have democratic governments. You see the firing of officials that people don‘t like. You see leaders closing themselves off to the truth.”