Is Donald Trump the victim of a political conspiracy against him at the official US statistics office? Or is the president launching a power grab that will allow him to massage data in a way usually reserved for autocrats?

That is the question that has gripped Washington and Wall Street since the president’s shock sacking of the head of the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) last week.

Trump insists he ousted Erika McEntarfer because she was doing a bad job – and may have even been rigging figures to make him look bad, he claims.

But observers worry the president is simply shooting the messenger, after the BLS reported dreadful revised job numbers . There are fears that Trump will now install a lackey, undermining faith in official data and, by extension, the US economy as a whole.

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