How Authoritarians “Cook the Books”

From Mussolini to Trump, false economic data gives the illusion of competence

When the news broke that Trump had fired Dr. Erika McEntarfer, Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, after the bureau published a jobs report he didn’t like, it seemed all too familiar.

I want to give some context for Trump’s action by addressing authoritarian practices of hiding economic harms caused by corruption, wrong-headed policies, the costs of war, and other factors.

The phrase “cook the books” usually refers to businesses inflating profits and performing other tricks to mask negative economic outcomes for shareholders, clients, the public, etc. It is a form of fraud. Here I use it broadly to capture the range of things authoritarians do to manufacture the positive economic realities they need to keep elite allies happy and maintain the illusion they are competent.

“Cooking the books” includes firing and silencing truthtellers about the economy–people such as Dr. McEntarfer who adhere to research protocols based on objectivity and facts—and staffing government offices with people willing to manipulate data or issue misleading or false reports.

It also means banishing inconvenient facts and data from the public record by pressuring bureaucrats, external analysts, and the media to simply leave out certain facts and trends while highlighting the results the leader needs.

This combination of tactics has produced a history of authoritarian rule that is full of great wheat harvests and other achievements based on misrepresentations of facts and data.

Classic Dictatorships Cook the Books

In long-established regimes, the population learns to doubt the numbers the government releases, which contrast so sharply with the realities of their lives. Communist states famously advertised their revolutionary gains even in the midst of famines or other mass hardship their own policies created.

Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin claimed the government was “dizzy with success” during a farm collectivization (part of his Five-Year Plan) that claimed the lives of millions from hunger. He later executed statisticians who published damaging data: in 1937 the Sorbonne-trained statistician Olimpiy Kvitkin was murdered by firing squad for releasing a census that showed a smaller population Stalin had announced three years earlier.

Benito Mussolini had pioneered the politicization of economic research. In 1926, one year after he declared dictatorship, he created a Central Institute of Statistics (ISTAT) with the purpose of making data into "an instrument of government action."

By 1931, Fascist statistics communicated "not so much the actual state of things as what the regime would like the people to believe,” as the anti-Fascist exile Gaetano Salvemini wrote in a detailed takedown of the regime’s supposed victory in the Battle for Wheat. Salvemini noted that statistics on this subject and others “have since 1925 been systematically tampered with for the glorification of the dictatorship.”

Fascist Italy also shows us how such propaganda is spread abroad if foreign media outlets that wish to keep their access fail to expose regime lies about the economy. George Seldes reported from Rome for the Chicago Tribune from 1925 to 1935. He was expelled from Italy for telling truths about the Fascist economy that Fortune and the New York Times declined to mention.

In his 1936 book Sawdust Caesar, he details the “jugglery, trickery, and distorted official figures and statements have marked Fascist finance” and reminds readers that bankruptcies; commercial failures; unemployment; import-export imbalances; work accidents; strikes and protests; and many other economic events could not be reported.

The same syndrome of foreign self-censoring to keep access is found in China, even though the Financial Times and other outlets have shown that the Xi Jinping era has seen a large-scale elimination of unflattering economic data. Has your youth unemployment rate hit an all-time high? Simply stop publishing statistics on youth unemployment.

“How bad is China’s economy? The data needed to answer that is vanishing,” the Wall Street Journal reported in May 2025. Dictatorship makes such silences and vanishings possible.

Electoral Autocracies Get Creative with Economic Data

In today’s age of electoral autocracies, the political stakes of convincing people that the leader is competent are higher. Since many people vote for strongmen who claim they will save the economy –by lowering the price of groceries or reducing inflation—leaders have more incentive to manipulate economic data to produce a deceptively rosy picture of the country.

Just ask Turks, who have lived through years of leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan insisting on the wisdom of his unconventional economic policies in the face of rampant inflation. In 2022, during an economic crisis which cost the Turkish currency 40% of its value, Erdogan engaged in classic autocratic behavior. Instead of listening to experts about how to reverse inflation and encourage growth, he further narrowed his circle of advisees and fired the head of Turkey’s statistics agency.

This mug lampoons Erdogan as a self-styled superman and “economic outlier” who is supposedly taking on the financial establishment. (Reis, a military commander title, is also a nickname for Erdogan). It is from my personal collection of autocrat-themed objects.

Trump is Now in Spin Dictator Mode

Trump, a master propagandist, knows how important it is to get ahead of a downturn and preserve the idea that he is “Making America Great Again.” Real data has been disappearing, and altered data proliferating, since the start of his second presidency.

Yet it will be hard for Trump to deny the economic harm he and DOGE are causing to the construction, tourism, hospitality, medical research, and myriad other industries with his draconian border controls, mass deportations, tariffs, and other measures.

Add in further likely hits to the economy from disease outbreaks, absence of disaster relief, and more, and it makes sense that Trump is acting now to have the right people in place to keep up the illusion that he is good for the country.

It is also in keeping with authoritarian tradition that Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, when asked about the impact of DOGE funding cuts on economic growth, hinted that his agency might decide to change how economic growth is calculated. This “solution” cooked up in Washington DC is worthy of Ankara or Beijing.

In Q4 2024, America had one of the most robust economies in the world. Now Moody’s chief analyst Mark Zandi is warning that the country is on the verge of a recession. Authoritarian history tells us that Dr. McEntarfer will not be the last to fall victim to Trump’s attempts to cook the books to deny the impacts of his destructive policies.