Press Releases

Friday morning the Bureau of Labor Statistics issued the August jobs report, which found that employment in the United States “has shown little change since April.” The U.S. economy has averaged just 27,000 jobs added per month over the past four months, a sharp drop from previous years, amid a clear and dramatic slowdown caused by President Trump’s chaotic and destructive tariff regime. The economy actually lost 13,000 jobs in June, and despite Trump’s supposed focus on strengthening U.S. manufacturing as a primary goal of his trade wars, that sector has now lost 78,000 jobs this year.

Rather than acknowledge and address these realities, however, the Trump Administration responded with bewildering commentary that ranged from ridiculously dishonest to shockingly out of touch:

• President Trump posted a meme with the words “The Golden Age” above a picture of himself a day after Fox Business declared “US job growth missed expectations in August amid economic uncertainty.”
• Secretary of Labor Lori Chavez-DeRemer told FoxNews, of the unemployment rate’s rise to 4.3% for the first time since the pandemic, a figure representing 7.4 million American workers in need of a job: “statistically, it’s nonexistent.”
• Before the report was released, Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick predicted the numbers would be more accurate because Trump purged the BLS for the stated reason of large data revisions. Then, after the report was released, Trump’s Director of the National Economic Council Kevin Hassett blamed political bias at BLS for the bad numbers and said those numbers would be revised way up [Aren’t revisions supposed to be bad?]. Secretary of Treasury Scott Bessent also suggested the data was faulty.
• White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt wrote that “President Trump is implementing the most aggressive pro-growth agenda in our country’s history,” specifically singling out for praise his leadership in the U.S. manufacturing sector – which lost 12,000 jobs this month.
• Of note: while Trump and his advisers alternated blaming Fed Chair Jerome Powell for disappointing numbers and falsely claiming that the numbers are in fact good because they show jobs all going to native-born workers [which is not true], the President’s Council of Economic Advisers did not take part in this chicanery. In fact, continuing its unusual silence from August, it did not say anything at all about the monthly jobs report.

Rep. Don Beyer, Senior House Democrat on the Joint Committee, said:

“Trump and his team are simultaneously arguing that the jobs report was good, that it was bad but would get better after revisions, and that it was bad because the people who run the data analysis were biased against them. These things obviously cannot all be true, and in fact none of them are. No amount of lies or window dressing will change the fact that Trump’s tariffs are grinding our economy into the ground, the administration will only succeed in convincing everyone that they are totally out of touch. The impacts on American working families will only get worse as long as this administration and Republicans in Congress keep us on this disastrous course.”