Donald Trump’s disastrous governance has successfully tanked America’s labor market.
The federal government released another weak jobs report Friday, after the previous poor jobs report resulted in Trump lashing out and firing the Commissioner of Labor Statistics. At the time, Trump baselessly claimed that the “Jobs Numbers were RIGGED in order to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad.”
The latest jobs report found that the economy only added 22,000 jobs in August, meaning there are more unemployed people than there are jobs. The unemployment rate increased slightly from 4.2 percent to 4.3 percent, the highest figure since 2021.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) also revised down the numbers from June to show there was negative job growth for the first time since the worst of the Covid-19 pandemic, as Bloomberg editor Joe Weisenthal noted.
The weak labor market is the culmination of Trump’s impulsive approach to economic policymaking. The president has repeatedly imposed new and shifting tariffs on imports from other countries, creating widespread economic uncertainty — at a time when Americans were already dealing with a brutal post-Covid economy and years of higher prices. (That brutal economy is exactly why Trump beat Kamala Harris last year.)
For the time being, as the monthly job reports underscore a Trump economy that is far from the golden age that his 2024 campaign had vowed to immediately unleash, a top administration-wide priority on this matter appears to be just blaming others for the Trump’s economy, and hoping that enough of the American public buys it.
One Trump administration official tells Rolling Stone that their office had pre-written different drafts of talking points for their principal: One version would blame BLS prominently for supposedly pumping out bad data; if the jobs report ended up being more positive for Trump, another version would downplay the BLS criticism or nix it entirely.
Friday’s monthly jobs report was not positive for the president.
“Today’s disastrous jobs report makes it increasingly clear that President Trump’s economic agenda is wrecking the labor market,” progressive Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) said in a statement. She added: “There are now more unemployed people than job openings in the United States for the first time since the pandemic, Trump’s immigration policies are shrinking the workforce, and his chaotic tariffs are slowing down hiring.”
Instead of immediately lashing out at the government’s statisticians on Friday, Trump took time to once again call his Jeffrey Epstein scandal “another Democrat HOAX.” He then quickly pivoted to criticizing Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell for refusing to lower interest rates.
“Jerome ‘Too Late’ Powell should have lowered rates long ago,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “As usual, he’s ‘Too Late!’” (Powell has slow-walked talk of lowering interest rates, taking a “wait and see” approach specifically because of Trump’s tariffs.)
Job searching is bleak. Last year, a survey found that 36 percent of job listings were fake. Companies post fake listings to look like they are growing and farm data.
There are more hits coming. Health insurance premiums are expected to spike, and millions of Americans will lose their health coverage as a result of Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill.”
Health care is the only field growing, adding 31,000 jobs — not exactly a positive given that America’s health care system is both hideously expensive for patients and maddeningly complex.
Manufacturing, on the other hand, lost 12,000 jobs and has lost 78,000 jobs over the year. Trump’s chaotic tariff regime is supposedly intended to boost U.S. manufacturing. Last month the White House took credit for a “manufacturing boom.”
The professional and business services sector lost 17,000 jobs, while the government lost 16,000 jobs, amid Trump’s mass firing campaign against federal workers.
Trump’s mass deportation campaign — his round-ups of undocumented immigrants and his efforts to strip other immigrants of their protected status and ability to work in America — isn’t helping anyone.
It isn’t just that America’s workforce has lost an estimated 1.2 million immigrants.
Mike Konczal, the Senior Director of Policy and Research at the Economic Security Project, noted Friday that “the native-born unemployment rate is at the highest levels since the pandemic.”
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