Reacting to July jobs numbers that fell well short of expectations, Donald Trump fired Bureau of Labor Statistics commissioner Erika McEntarfer and accused her, falsely, of being a Kamala Harris operative. From Steve Benen at MaddowBlog:
Roughly two hours before the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics released the latest jobs data, Donald Trump published a rather furious missive to his social media platform, calling his own handpicked Federal Reserve chair, Jerome Powell, ‘a stubborn MORON.’… It was, to be sure, a rather unhinged tantrum, but it was also a pretty big hint: Trump had seen the job numbers, and he wasn’t pleased. The public soon learned that the job totals were quite awful, and over the first seven months of the year, job growth in the United States slowed to a 16-year low (not including the totals from the pandemic in 2020). Trump obviously had reason to be disappointed—he keeps telling people how ‘hot’ the economy is, and reality keeps getting in the way—but he has no one to blame but himself: It’s his own agenda that’s done so much damage to the job market.
via Steve Benen, MaddowBlog
Trump’s temper tantrum wasn’t just over July’s abysmal jobs report. The revisions for May and June 2025 were even more brutal, reflecting a U.S. economy under tremendous strain from Trump tariffs and impulsive, petulant “leadership” for which he’s known.
While the data from July was discouraging, far more important were the drastic revisions from May and June—which were down by a combined 258,000 jobs, compared with earlier, preliminary reporting. Indeed, according to the revisions, the U.S. economy created just 33,000 jobs combined over May and June, which is a woeful total for an economy that Donald Trump and his Republican cohorts have incessantly described as ‘hot’ in recent weeks.
via Steve Benen, MaddowBlog
The meek jobs numbers are notable for many reasons, not least because the sluggish growth is on par with pain felt during the 2009 economic downturn.
If we exclude 2020, when the pandemic wreaked havoc on the economy, the first seven months of this year show the slowest job growth in the United States since 2009, when the economy was still hemorrhaging jobs from the Great Recession.
via Steve Benen, MaddowBlog
AUTHOR FOOTNOTE
Benen’s “excluding the pandemic” frame is notable, obviously, because it was also via Donald’s failings that America descended into recession during Regime 1, after he killed hundreds of thousands of Americans via incompetence.
Trump and his mafia, led by Jared Kushner, mishandled COVID so spectacularly in 2020 that it led to U.S. GDP contracting somewhere between 14.8% and 23.0%, with net losses estimated somewhere between $3.2 to $4.8 trillion.
Since we’re all about apples-to-apples here at TrumpFile, job losses during March and April of 2020 reached as high as (according to reports) 20 to 25 million, with unemployment surging to 14.7% in April.
So spare us the histrionics about leadership failings. Failure is the hallmark of both Trump regimes, and no amount of firings or furious Truth Social missives will change that.
