Larry Summers thinks Donald Trump has sunk lower than one of the most ill-remembered presidents in U.S. history.
Trump fired the commissioner of labor statistics earlier this week after their department issued a report showing a slowdown in hiring. The president accused the appointee of toying with the numbers for political reasons. The former treasury secretary called the claim “preposterous” in an interview with ABC’s “This Week.”
“These numbers are put together by teams of literally hundreds of people following detailed procedures that are in manuals,” he said. “There’s no conceivable way that the head of the [Bureau of Labor Statistics] could have manipulated this number.”
Summers said that democracy is “giving way to authoritarianism” and that Trump’s purges put him in the same league as Richard Nixon.
“This is way beyond anything that Richard Nixon ever did. I’m surprised that other officials have not responded by resigning themselves, as took place when Nixon fired people lawlessly,” he said.”Firing statisticians goes with threatening the heads of newspapers, it goes with launching assaults on universities, it goes with launching assaults on law firms that defend clients that the elected boss finds uncongenial. This is really scary stuff.”
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Summers’ criticism of Trump comes shortly after the president claimed he was a visitor to the private island of the late sex criminal Jeffrey Epstein. Trump, who has been dogged by his associations with Epstein, claimed he “never had the privilege” of visiting Epstein’s home in the U.S. Virgin Islands, before naming both Bill Clinton and Summers as Epstein’s one-time guests.
Watch the interview below via YouTube:
