"Team Trump struggles to spin the worst job numbers since the Great Recession"

[Miles Archer]

Team Trump struggles to spin the worst job numbers since the Great Recession

In mid-February, as Donald Trump’s State of the Union address neared, Peter Navarro, a leading White House voice on trade and economic policy, told Fox News that the U.S. economy was “perfect.” A week later, during JD Vance’s latest Fox News appearance, the vice president celebrated the “Trump boom” in the economy.

Soon after, the American public learned that economic growth during the first year of the president’s second term reached a nine-year low (excluding the pandemic). Late last week, the latest job numbers were even worse: The U.S. economy lost 90,000 jobs in February, and the unemployment rate inched higher.

Indeed, the closer one looked at the data, the worse the figures appeared. Trump has been in the White House for 14 months, and during that time the cumulative total is 150,000 jobs. In the last 14 months of Joe Biden’s presidency, by contrast, the American economy added 1.74 million jobs.

As economist Heather Long noted, the Republican president launched his “Liberation Day” tariffs in April 2025, and if we combine all of the jobs lost and gained between May 2025 and February 2026, there’s actually been a net loss in American jobs.

So much for the “Trump boom.”

https://www.ms.now/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/team-trump-struggles-to-spin-on-the-worst-job-numbers-since-the-great-recession

[dalton99a]

1. The Trump stagflation will impoverish millions of working Americans

[WSHazel]

2. Job numbers are likely inflated

The real job numbers are likely much, much worse. Trump’s BLS shell gamed hundreds of thousands of 2025 job losses into 2024, when Biden was president, and there is no reason to believe the current numbers.

If Trump is willing to lie to kill people, how can we trust this administration about anything?

[underpants]

4. They also got rid of a readymade excuse when the fired the head of BLS

Trump could just say he didn’t believe the numbers and that would be enough for MAGA certainly and probably much of MSM.

Now everyone knows this is his BLS and his numbers which, as you said, are likely not fully trusted. The financial world still believes them but I’m sure they think a thumb is in some way on the scale now. The acting Director Antoni (Heritage of course) has probably realized the professionalism and standards followed by BLS personnel.

[Johnny2X2X]

3. It's still not getting 1/10th the attention it deserves

2025 was a black hole for jobs, the job market just cratered. 125,000 jobs created in a whole year is catastrophic for working people.

It really should be getting all the attention that inflation got under Biden. But that would take an independent media and we all know who owns the media.

I'm old enough to remember when Biden's economy was creating so many jobs that 300,000 plus was the norm and one month when over 300K were expected and we only got 188,000 it was "the biggest jobs miss ever" and it was a national story for weeks. 188,000 jobs in a month was painted as a crisis while Trump just added less than that in a whole freaking year and it's a blip.

Working people drive our economy, when the economy is producing no jobs, the economy is going to tank.

I believe firms absorbed the tariffs and did what they could to not pass price hikes along to consumers, but at the cost of forgoing expansions and investments that create new jobs and by laying people off. So inflation is still here, and about to get worse, but it wasn't as bad as it should have been, and instead the jobs market tanked.

The Biden economy worked because of the jobs creation. Millions of new jobs drove up wages in excess of what inflation was, we had an extended period of real wage growth for the Middle and lower classes. Working people actually got ahead under Biden, but it was never talked about because of the price of eggs. Working people are about to be buried under Trump, it's going to get very very bad.

[Wednesdays]

5. And now that gas prices are spiking because of the war,

...a recession is now a certainty.