'Good question!’ Trump grilled on whether he'll keep firing people who deliver bad news
After going off on two long rants about his poor job numbers, President Donald Trump took questions from the press on his way to the helicopter en route to his Bedminster, New Jersey, country club. Among the comments he made was in agreement that no one should trust his job numbers.
The new report showed bad numbers for July, but also readjusted the May and June numbers, showing that the two were down significantly.
The first question that Trump got was about his claim that the jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics was "rigged."
"Oh, yeah, I think so," Trump said as the reporter continued to ask his question. "If you look at before the election, the same kind of thing happened, and I think you'll see some very interesting information come out, but you have to have honest reports, and when you look at those numbers and you look at the numbers just before the election, they corrected it by 800,000 or 900,000 jobs."
The count was 818,000 jobs that accounted for a miscount over the year.
Among the last questions Trump took was from a reporter asking if people should fear for their jobs if they present "information or data you don't like" and whether people should trust the jobs reports in the future.
"I've always had a problem with these numbers! You know, I was thinking about it this morning. Before the numbers that came out, I said, 'Who is the person that does these numbers?' And then they gave me stats about before the election. I had a similar problem. I mean, she gave out numbers that were so good for the Democrats. It was like, unbelievable. And then right after the election, she corrected those numbers, I think, with almost 900,000 correction."
It was not an almost 900,000 correction.
"I think no one had ever seen anything like it. Well, today she did the same thing with the 253,000-whatever the number was. No, no. We need people we can trust. I mean, your question is a very good one. We need people we can trust," said Trump.
The new numbers showed glowing numbers for Trump for the first six months of his presidency, only being corrected in July.
Journalist Phil Mattingly commented earlier on Friday, "This displays an intentional ignorance toward the way economic data is collected, presented, revised, and the federal employees and appointees who do it. It's extraordinarily counterproductive and there's simply no net long game benefit to going down this path."
See the clips below or at the link here.
- YouTube youtu.be
- YouTube youtu.be