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Monday, September 22, 2025

The Donald Trump Show. Episode 7: Spending More on Everything in the Golden Age.

At some point in the process of the Heritage Foundation designing the second run of the Donald Trump Reality Television Show, the question can only have come up: “What happens when the Federal Government economic data begins to show that all of the wealth and power is being transferred-up to the Ultra-Wealthy?” That the tax burden is being transferred-down onto the backs of the common citizenry? The ultimate goal of the show is unlikely to have been achieved and locked-in before the numbers are sufficiently obvious to raise alarms.

The administration hit the ground running on this point. Within weeks of the show's first episode, the Federal Economic Statistics Advisory Committee (FESAC) was terminated as directed in the Project 2025: Mandate for Leadership1. Put euphemistically,

...advisory committees are populated by activists from organizations openly hostile to conservative principles who use the committees to impede conservative policy.2

More directly: highly qualified and respected a-political advice-and-oversight experts can only interfere with Donald Trump Show needs. It is vitally important that the numbers created by the show's writers not be contradicted by any off-stage characters.

That done, the strategy of choice would be to simply present the reality show numbers, after the same fashion real-reality numbers had always been presented, and let the show's fictional media glowingly report them as astonishingly positive numbers — contradicting all real-reality expert predictions — showing that the star of the show is every bit the genius he claims to be. Lies, exaggerations and 8th grade vocabulary notwithstanding.

The process would now work “properly”. At Donald Trump's Bureau of Economical Analysis, elves would be diligently working away to provide the wish-list of the Ultra-Wealthy (who have hung their stockings with care).

Of course, that alone would not be enough. The Donald Trump Show audience is not going to suspend disbelief forever. Regardless that there is a reality-show reality of less than 3% inflation (the number the writers have required of his elves on each occasion thus far), the prices they pay for products and services in the real world going up in a big way is already effecting the show's popularity.

Merely capturing the federal statistics machinery could only serve purposes for so long. To massage the numbers too vigorously could reduce the effectiveness of hijacking the traditional data. Mismatches with Federal Reserve System internal data (for the little time it will remain independent) and with respected private data aggregators will raise eyebrows. Actual prices on grocery shelves will raise eyebrows. Questions begin to be asked.

Already, the administration and it's allies have been assembling new strategies to address these challenges on the fly. Donald Trump promised zero inflation beginning on day one of the show. When it failed to (de)materialize, he suggested that the consumer would likely experience some “pain” for some number of months. Most recently, he is suggesting that there could be a difficult couple of years ahead. The Golden Age he has literally promised will be wonderful, we are assured... when it gets here. Right after the mid-term elections return Republican majorities in the House and Senate. Otherwise, the “Democrats who hate America” will prevent it.

While the goalposts have been changed in order to buy time, still more Bureau of Labor Statistics reports have proven troublesome to the Trump Show story line. Always, numbers that threaten the story line are “fake”.

In a compelling episode, the star fired the “Statistics Commissioner”. The supporting cast has gone to work to declare present traditional BLS methodology in need of major changes. Scott Bessent, the actor playing Secretary of the Treasury, on the Donald Trump Show, has declared “it was incumbent on the BLS to find a new way of collecting data.” From every mouth, it was the numbers that were wrong never the star or the premise of the show.

Trump has suggested that he will remove military spending from the federal GDP calculations. This, presumably, in order to provide an excuse for why his GDP numbers will be much lower than his predecessors'. It will conveniently muddy historical comparisons, as well. For the purposes of the Donald Trump Reality Show it will be said to make such comparisons impossible. His much smaller GDP will actually be much higher than the “fake” historical numbers of the likes of Joe Biden.

Billionaire Steve Forbes has pitched-in suddenly revealing that measuring economic growth by Gross Domestic Product [GDP], as has been done for decades before the Trump Show, was ill-conceived. GDP based national growth primarily on consumer spending. The true measure, he informs us, is “Gross Output” [GO].

With GO, we learn that business investment and entrepreneurship, not consumer spending, are the catalysts for economic growth. Consumer spending is the effect, not the cause, of prosperity.3

The observation for decades now that the consumer drives the national economy, he suddenly reveals, has always been wrong. The role of the common consumer in economic decision-making must be greatly reduced.

GDP is the measure of the value of retail goods and services to consumers. This number is universally expected to be negatively impacted by tariffs. Gross Output [GO], on the other hand, adds the measure of all business-to-business and supply-chain goods and services. The number is always much higher because it counts many more transactions (double-counting many along the way). With the switch to the GO as the standard, The Donald Trump Show would be able to proclaim large increases by comparing apples to apple orchards. He would remain a genius.

The Trump Show, the public is warned, must radically overhaul the methods for determining government statistics hence forward. The numbers too often come out wrong! It threatens the story line of the Reality-President Show. The show's writers must take control of the numbers or the premise of the whole show is threatened.

*

On September 19, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics announced that “The 2024 Consumer Expenditures annual data release, scheduled on September 23, 2025, will be rescheduled to a later date.”4 No further information is provided. Media queries are receiving no response.

The Consumer Expenditure Survey (CE) is the name of the continuous survey of representative households, from among U.S. consumers, and provides much of the raw data used to calculate the federal government's monthly Consumer Price Index (CPI) inflation numbers. Changes in the CE methodology can greatly alter the official inflation numbers. Failure to release CE survey numbers to the public means that the government's CPI numbers can only be taken on faith.

But then, the Donald Trump Reality-President Show numbers are always highly positive and always support the show's story line.


1Project 2025: Mandate for Leadership https://static.heritage.org/project2025/2025_MandateForLeadership_FULL.pdf 

2Project 2025 @ 666.

4U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer Expenditure Surveys Page. https://www.bls.gov/cex/notices/2025/ce-2024-reschedule.htm



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