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He demolished many environmental and climate-change protections and protocols, often out of pique because some uppity scientist who had spent his entire career researching the subject dared to question Trump’s ask-no-questions snap judgments.

The low point of the president’s “my ignorance is superior to your knowledge” approach to governance came at the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic, when Trump decided that pretending a huge problem didn’t exist was the same as solving it. After the fact, he admitted that he knew the virus was going to be devastating but decided to lie to the American people about it to preserve his political standing.

When respected medical professionals—Dr. Anthony Fauci comes to mind—pointed out the errors in the president’s judgment, Trump did everything he could to discredit them and suppress their concerns.

The result was that, at the peak of the pandemic, five times as many Americans died from COVID as did citizens in other parts of the industrialized world.

The issue wasn’t that the United States had been exposed to a more virulent strain of the virus.

No, our national affliction was that we had a leader in the White House who considered information and facts to be his enemies.

So, he fought knowledge, not the disease.

And hundreds of thousands of our grandparents, parents, aunts, uncles and friends who otherwise might have survived didn’t.

That Trump found support for his know-nothing approach to public policy is proof that P.T. Barnum made a grave underestimation.

Barnum said there was a sucker born every minute. But in MAGA land, they seem to be produced at 10 or 12 times that rate.

Reinstalled now in the White House, Trump wants to do to math in his second term what he did to science in his first.

That’s why he fired U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Commissioner Erika McEntarfer.

Like so many other people who run afoul of our petulant president, McEntarfer made the mistake of telling the truth.

The BLS, a unit of the Labor Department, revised its estimates for payrolls in May and June downward by 250,000 jobs and estimated that the U.S. economy produced only 73,000 new jobs in July.

The report apparently enraged Trump, who’s always only a tidbit of bad news away from yet another temper tantrum.

The fact is, though, that economists—conservative or liberal, Republican or Democrat—have been warning him this could and would happen ever since he took office if he continued his herky-jerky approach to managing the economy.

Trump’s on-again, off-again threats and implementation have introduced at least two elements into the economy that the market struggles to absorb.

The first is that the possibility of tariffs has prompted many businesses to raise prices pre-emptively. That’s bad news for consumers who already feel as if they have been pounded by inflation over the past few years, but it’s a predictable response. Savvy business owners price not by what they paid for a certain product, but by what they think the cost will be to replace it.

The second is that markets abhor uncertainty—and that’s all Trump has fed them since he took office again.

Business owners can’t make good decisions if they don’t know what things will cost from week to week.

This includes hiring decisions. Most business owners are going to be skittish about bringing new employees on board if those owners don’t have reasonable confidence that they can afford to do so. No responsible businessperson wants to hire someone and then fire that person two weeks later because the president of the United States did the hokey pokey with tariffs again.

Better to wait until the dust settles.

That’s why the numbers show that hiring has slowed.

The market is reacting the way the market always does to such uncertainty. It is reacting the way everyone who understands anything about economics warned the president it would.

But as he did with the pandemic, Trump wants to shut up and discredit anyone who might understand the nature of the problem.

He fired someone for telling him that two plus two equals four when he desperately wants everyone to believe the answer is 22.

Once again, though, it’s the president’s numbers that don’t add up.