Oh, good: A teachable moment for a political scientist in a room full of macro-market mavens.

Part and parcel of transitional autocracy (i.e., the liminal space between democracy and authoritarian government) is the normalization of the abnormal.

The goal of an aspiring autocrat who, for whatever reason, can’t usurp the existing political structure overnight is to wear down the public — to exhaust the body politic and desensitize it such that the previously unthinkable becomes not only acceptable, but commonplace.

America’s in that liminal space right now. On Monday, for example, Donald Trump admonished a Bloomberg reporter in alarmingly menacing terms, hissing “Quiet piggy” in one of the creepier moments of his second term so far. On Tuesday, while glad-handing Mohamed bin Salman in the Oval Office, Trump suggested the dissident Washington Post columnist butchered by the Saudi government had it coming and then threatened to pull ABC’s broadcast license for asking a question he didn’t like.

Those incidents made the news, but compared to how such brazen behavior would’ve been treated under any other modern president, Trump’s antics were met with a collective shrug.

Whether you realize it or not, that’s the context for the BLS’s announcement on Wednesday that no, the bureau won’t publish a full October jobs report, just like Karoline Leavitt said they wouldn’t earlier this month.

As Kevin Hassett indicated last week, the BLS will instead publish only the establishment survey figures. There will not be an official read on the unemployment rate.

As the screenshot shows, the September JOLTS release is canceled too. That data will be reported on what amounts to a three-month delay with October’s job openings figures.

To dispense with the obvious, this means the Fed will be down two jobs reports when they meet next month. They’ll have September’s release (it’s due tomorrow), but not October’s, nor November’s which’ll be published on December 16.

Now back to the more important issue. The law on this seems a bit ambiguous. The BLS was established in 1884. Three decades later, it was subsumed by the newly-created Department of Labor. 17 years after that, in 1930, the relevant statute was amended such that the BLS was directed to,

…collect, collate, report and publish at least once each month full and complete statistics of the volume of and changes in employment, as indicated by the number of persons employed, the total wages paid and the total hours of employment, in the service of the Federal Government, the States and political subdivisions thereof, and in the following industries and their principal branches: (1) Manufacturing; (2) mining, quarrying, and crude petroleum production; (3) building construction; (4) agriculture and lumbering; (5) transportation, communication, and other public utilities; (6) the retail and wholesale trades; and such other industries as the Secretary of Labor may deem it in the public interest to include.

That’s the establishment survey. The amendment didn’t say anything about the household survey, which didn’t even exist yet. It was created a decade later.

In 1959, the BLS was given responsibility for the Current Population Survey and also for publishing the results. As far as I can tell, nothing requires the bureau to retroactively conduct that survey in the event it’s missing.

So, is the Trump administration breaking the law to skip the household survey for October and roll up the establishment survey into November’s release, as the BLS said it intends to do? No, with the caveat that I’m not an attorney.

Is there any indication the administration has an interest in not publishing a household survey covering last month? Put differently, is there something nefarious about this? No, not that I can tell.

However, the government shutdown — which is why the household survey wasn’t conducted in the first place — was arguably intentional on the administration’s part, and in my judgment, it was a harbinger. You’re going to see more and more states of exception, to use the political science term, until the exceptional becomes par for the course.

The cancelation of the October jobs report (again with the caveat that the establishment survey figures will be published on December 16 with the full November jobs report) is just a preview. There’s still no word, for example, on whether the October CPI report will be published, and even if it is, I can assure you it won’t be because Trump feels bound by any statutes.

Each and every aberration that comes and goes without a national uproar is another step down the road to autocracy. The question isn’t “Can he do that?” it’s “Who’d stop him if he did?”

Let me put it this way: There’s a law on the books that says I’m not allowed to rob banks. But words on paper aren’t sufficient to dissuade people from being bank robbers. You need an enforcement mechanism.

The US government doesn’t have such a mechanism when it comes to Trump. Even if it did, it wouldn’t matter: He’s immune from prosecution thanks to the infinite wisdom of a Supreme Court he partially staffed.