Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers doesn’t hold back on Trump: “This is way beyond anything Richard Nixon ever did”
Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers has hit out at Donald Trump’s politics.
Once again, Donald Trump finds himself in the middle of another scandal that has arisen as he slowly loses his grip on America’s right wing.
The latest backlash against the President comes after he fired US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) commissioner Erika McEntarfer. The leading US labor market statistician was axed after releasing a report that showed the national economy added just 73,000 jobs in July, a number that fell short of expectations.
The president took to social media to say that the numbers reported were “RIGGED in order to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad” and the US economy was, in fact, “BOOMING”. The BCC called the sacking “unprecedented” and said that it has “sparked accusations that Trump was politicising economic data.”
‘This is the stuff of democracies giving way to authoritarianism’
Larry Summers is one such voice who has not held back on Trump: the 70-year-old served as United States Secretary of the Treasury from 1999 to 2001 and was the director of the National Economic Council from 2009 to 2010.
Speaking to ABC News, the former former Treasury Secretary told broadcasters that “This is way beyond anything Richard Nixon ever did‚” referring to Nixon’s right wing politics of the 1970s, which saw the height of the Cold War, the Vietnam war, and ultimately Watergate, all bring his time at the White House to an end.
“This is the stuff of democracies giving way to authoritarianism," he added. “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.”
Trump has been involved in a constant string of hugely unpopular decisions with supporters, including foreign intervention in Israel and Iran, as well as various incoherent messages that have finally seem huge conservative figures turn against him.
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The Jeffrey Epstein scandal is perhaps the most prominent of them: from promising to release the files to denying their existence, the president is currently fumbling his way around the right wing of American politics, looking for something to divert attention away from the embarrassment. This time, however, it seems to have failed.
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