This is what 'really got under Trump's skin' with jobs report: White House insiders
President Donald Trump is still reeling over last week’s ‘awful’ jobs report according to an anonymous White House official, who told CNN’s Alayna Treene Tuesday what specifically “set him off” regarding the report.
Published last Friday, the figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed that only 73,000 jobs were created in July, far below the projected 115,000, while also revising job numbers from May and June to be 258,000 lower than initial assessments. Within hours of the report being published, Trump fired BLS Commissioner Erika McEntarfer, claiming the findings were “rigged.”
“What I was told in what led to this decision on Friday was, even though he had brought up McEntarfer's name before given she is a Biden appointee – something the president does not like – he didn't really have any reason to try and axe her before Friday because a lot of the job reports we saw in the first few months of this administration were actually very good,” Treene said.
“But what really got under his skin with the Friday jobs report was not necessarily the slowing of the economy and the adding of less jobs than they had anticipated, it was the revisions of the previous months that they had celebrated, May and June, that actually, the number of jobs added was lower than they had previously said.”
Moments earlier on Tuesday, Trump, speaking with CNBC, called his decision to fire McEntarfer “very political,” and accused her of trying to help Democrats in the 2024 election.
“Just days before the election, they put out numbers that it was like the country was on fire (and) doing so well, and then they did a revision about two weeks later, and the revision was down by almost 900,000 jobs,” Trump said. “I said man, what would have happened if I lost, think of it! I would have said they gave phony numbers and then they revised them a week and a half later.”
Trump was likely referring to a BLS preliminary estimate in late August of 2024 that job numbers would be revised downward by 818,000 over a 12-month period. The estimate, however, was made months before the election, giving Democrats little benefit from the initial overestimation.
Still, the anonymous White House officials, Treene said, insisted the latest jobs report suggested that “something was awry.”
“That's what set him off,” the White House official told Treene, she said. “He saw the revisions and knew something was awry for it to be changed so drastically, and this isn't a first-time thing. Considering so many companies make decisions based off these numbers, it's an issue that needed to be fixed.”
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