← Bulwark Takes
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- [00:00]
Tim Miller
Hey, everybody. Tim Miller with the Bulwark here with our publisher, Sarah Longwell. We've got some breaking news. Trump has apparently, via social media, just announced that he is firing the Commissioner of Labor Statistics because the job numbers are so bad. That's how bad the job numbers are this month. Means they're going to get into the details of that jobs report. But we got to at least start with this breaking news. It's literally just sent to me right before we start taping. Here it is, Donald Trump's bleep. I was just informed that our country's jobs numbers in quotes. So I guess giving scare quotes to government statistics now are being produced by a Biden appointee, Dr. Erica McEnterfer. Sorry if I mispronounced that. The Commissioner of Labor Statistics who faked the jobs numbers before the election to try and boost Congress chances of victory. Then a bunch of blah, blah, blah. He writes, we need accurate jobs numbers. I've directed my team to fire this Biden political appointee immediately. She'll be replaced with someone much more competent and qualified. Oh, I'm sure important numbers like this must be fair and accurate. The current jobs report said there were only 73,000 jobs added. He writes, a shock. And then he writes, but more importantly, that a major mistake was made and they revised 258,000 jobs downward in the prior two months. He goes on to let you know that the economy is booming, all caps under Trump. And then on the way out, he throws a quick shiv at Jerome Powell, writing, Jerome, quote, too late. Powell should also be put, quote, out to pasture. Thank you for your attention to this matter. Wow. A lot there, Sarah. Take it, whatever, whichever place you'd like to go.
- [01:35]
Sarah Longwell
All right, first of all, I just want people to understand, like, this is genuinely nuts. Here is what he's doing. He is firing the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics because he doesn't like that they are reporting on the statistics about the bad job he's doing on the economy. Right. So he has made choices. The labor market has slowed in a very serious way. And two things are in this job report that are kind of gobsmacking. So the first is how much they missed for the month of July, what they had hoped. Right. The estimate had been that they would add about110,115,000 jobs. Said it was 73,000. That's a big, big miss. Way lower than they were hoping. But even worse, the biggest thing that happened is then they went back to June and May and they revised the number of Jobs down by almost 250,000, which meant that in those two months, when the Bureau of Labor Statistics came out with their jobs reports, they had wildly overestimated them. Now, here's the thing. We don't know. We don't know why that happened like that is a mystery. But they were putting a much more favorable sheen on the slowing economy. And so people are looking at those job numbers from May and June and saying, these are pretty good. This is pretty steady, you know, good growth on track for what they were anticipating. But no, they've revised to them way down. Okay, so if the labor market is slowing, it is likely because of the tariffs, because of inflation, because of a bunch of policies of Donald Trump's own making, the uncertainty around the tariffs. And so he's firing this person just for reporting the statistics accurately. That's it. That's what's happening.
- [03:20]
Tim Miller
Yeah. I want to go deeper with you on the actual jobs numbers in a second, but let's just stick on this firing for one second also. Again, always Trump, like, lives in these gray areas where he totally breaks the norms. And, you know, he does things that gives his people a talking point that they can talk about. Right. The idea this is a Biden appointee, you can understand how people might think, well, okay, new administration should be able to get their appointees in various jobs throughout the administration. But, like, that is not what's happening here. It's not. Trump came in and said, okay, you know, across a number of these agencies, they're Biden appointees, they're political appointees. We want to place them with Trump. People like, okay, that's not what. That's not what he did. What he did, as you said, is he is targeting a single person, firing them because they reported the truth.
- [04:11]
Sarah Longwell
Yes.
- [04:11]
Tim Miller
That's where we're at. He is firing a government employee for accurately providing data to the American people. This sort of data is important for a variety of different things. It's important for the Fed. We'll get to Joan Powell in a second as they decide what to do with interest rates. It's similar to what we're seeing with the National Weather Service. And we have a lot of worries about this down in the Gulf coast right now about are we going to be getting as accurate hurricane warnings as we used to because they fired a bunch of people. So, like, there, it matters that we can trust our federal government to put out data that is reliable. And what Donald Trump has done by firing this woman for putting out reliable info, as he's basically saying, you can't trust the federal government. Like we are essentially 1980s Moscow, like around Chernobyl and like where people are going to, people are going to put out whatever necessary to keep me happy. And so even if he does replace this person with a serious right wing person, which who the hell knows, Right. How could you even try? Right. Like it brings into doubt the future data that's coming out of this administration. Because it's like, well, okay, clearly they're going to make personnel choices and only reward people who either cook the books or only put out things that look good for the administration.
- [05:30]
Sarah Longwell
Yeah. And like this is not. She didn't go and single handedly put some thumb on the scale that's like make Donald Trump's jobs numbers look bad. Like that. I'm not. It is unclear to me why they were so off before there could have been some major delay in reporting. I mean, they use payroll from these companies to figure out this. And so, you know, I've been back.
- [05:55]
Tim Miller
When I was at the RNC in 2012, it was my job to put out the statement around jobs report week. This has been happening since the before Trump times. Right. It's like there's error in this sort of thing. And the interesting thing about this error is the revision down actually matches what people expected. There was this whole discourse going on the last two weeks among economists. They're like, why is the economy better than we think it should be? When you look underneath, I've interviewed economy experts. When you look underneath the hood, I think it was Joe Weisenthal I was interviewing. And he's like, if you look at the Dallas Fed report and this is just, you know, the local Fed for that region and they interview the local business owners and like, what are you saying? And like all the anecdotes are horrible. Like, you know, he's like, you think we are in a recession? Looking at the Fed report, how does that match the jobs report? Right. So this was kind of a thing in economic dork circles for a while. And, and it seems to me really that, you know, it's just like anything else. Just like the An Seltzer poll. Like sometimes there's errors in statistics and like you get more data and you update the data and you look back in and now it really. This is why he's so pissed. Like the truth has come in line. Like the data has come in line with what kind of people were seeing and expecting out in the world. And I'm sorry to cut you off.
- [07:06]
Sarah Longwell
Well, no, no, no. I think that's right. I mean, this is the, this is actually the biggest revision, though, since 1979, with one exception, which was April of 2020, where they also had a big miss. Right. Because it's Covid. But other than that, like, it is actually a really big step back, a really big revision. And so it's unclear why that happened. I'm sure there's going to be a lot of people with questions. But, but to your point, the revisions are much more in line with what everybody was expecting based on what we're seeing. Like the idea that the labor market would be thriving in an environment where Donald Trump is making it impossible for anybody to plan anything. Like the idea that you're going to shift the entire American manufacturing economy over the next 50 years, when the guy changes his mind every day and people are going to invest in that. Like, that never made sense. And so even me, not an economist, not even very good at math, has been sort of like, why are the jobs numbers so good? Like, what is going on here? And so, but the thing is, is like when the revisions are down to like 14,000, like we added 14,000 jobs in June, 19,000 jobs in May, it might be reversed, but like, really, really low numbers now, those are real markers of recession type labor market.
- [08:27]
Tim Miller
Absolutely. And just so before we just move in, because there's a couple of things I want to talk about about the actual jobs numbers. Do you have anything else? Just on kind of the chilling nature of this firing and what he said about Powell. I mean, you know, saying the same at Powell at the end about putting him out to pasture.
- [08:42]
Sarah Longwell
So I was watching a clip of Fox Business when the job numbers came in and Maria Bartiromo and like, we.
- [08:48]
Tim Miller
Have that clip, actually.
- [08:49]
Sarah Longwell
Let's watch it. 73,000 jobs, 73,000 jobs created in the month of July, number just coming out. And that's total 4.2% at the unemployment rate, right in line with expectations. Here are the numbers for the month of July. Jobs came in at 73,000. That was lower than the expectation, which called for 110,000 jobs. The unemployment rate right in step with expectations at 4.2%.
- [09:16]
Tim Miller
Well, there you go. The faces tell all there, but what.
- [09:20]
Sarah Longwell
They want to do is immediately pivot to the idea that it is Jerome Powell's fault for not lowering interest rates. I don't think interest rates have that much to do with the labor market. Like, I don't understand how lowering interest rates was going to necessarily help this.
- [09:36]
Tim Miller
Jobs report in a broader sense. The idea is if you know, the economy is slowing and you don't have the inflation issues from tariffs. You do want to lower interest rates because it's like, in theory, this means that businesses are going to take more risk and because they know that they can get lower rates on their debt instead of you're going to build a new factory or whatever, it's not going to cost as much. Right. That's the theory. But it doesn't a, it just doesn't happen in a snap like that. And part of the reason why that drone pal wasn't doing it was because the months looked good. And Maria Bartirom and all the other people on Fox were like, talking about how great the golden age it was, Right? So it's like, you're not going to lower rates if it were in the golden age. So anyway, and I think that they're like, reaction there is free telling about how bad it is. And I just, I don't know. The Powell thing is chilling. I just, I keep going back to the economic experts I talked to, and it's like they think it's the worst case scenario. And I just want to draw one more parallel here about why this matters beyond just the fact that it's unfair to this woman and that it's, you know, just kind of soft, authoritarian nonsense. It matters because it's like if you can't trust the data coming out of the government, all right, and then if you were to fire Powell and you can't trust that the Fed is actually independent anymore, then you can't trust the fundamental basis of the economy. Part of the reason why our economy is better than Argentina's or in other places around the world is because people feel like America is a safe harbor, can invest and, you know, like, the institutions are strong and et cetera, like, that framework starts to break down. And, and I, to me, that is the most, like, chilling thing about this firing is that, like, it's like a little, it's one thing, it's one data point, but it's a point towards like, total kind of, I don't know, banana republic area on, on economic stuff.
- [11:36]
Sarah Longwell
And here's the thing. So here's what's most chilling to me. We have seen Donald Trump politicize things that are not typically politicized in the way that he's politicizing them. So that's the attorney general, that's the FBI director, the deputy FBI director. There's just a ton of things that Donald Trump is politicizing, but they are, they do, like, have some political Roles. Right. Like, normally, like, the FBI director is meant to span things, but, like, it's just a little grayer. Donald Trump is now moving in to politicize things that really are not politicized.
- [12:09]
Tim Miller
Our government labor statistics.
- [12:12]
Sarah Longwell
This is not. This is not where you get to go in and mess around. Like, nobody cares who the. Whether a Biden. The only reason Biden appointed that person is because that was like the term was up. You know, like, these are. And it's not like a single person. There's a whole apparatus there. There's not just one person who's mucking with the numbers. It's insane to fire someone. So anyway. But the politicizing of things that are heretofore entirely apolitical is part of what's scary, too.
- [12:41]
Tim Miller
Yeah. All right, just really quick, a couple other things in the jobs numbers, because I literally. My dad's a finance guy, so I was literally having this conversation with him two days ago I landed in Denver, and I'm like, what do you make of what's happening? And he's like, well, I don't know. He's like, maybe everything's being held up by. Or everything's being kind of propped up by all this investment that's going into AI. Right. Like, all these data centers are getting built and it's sort of masking, you know, and that if you, like, look at the data and I was kind of reading a lot of the economic smarties this morning, that like, feels kind of right. Like the jobs right now in this economy are basically. There's a bunch of gains in jobs in healthcare that might be going away.
- [13:19]
Sarah Longwell
The boomers are getting sick and then. And they're cutting it. And they're cutting it with Medicaid.
- [13:23]
Tim Miller
So that might be going away. But. So for, at least for last month, there were job gains in healthcare. There are job gains in, like, also similar, basically elder care, social services, like this kind of stuff. And then there were not really job gains. But if you look at some of the other data that was put out, like, economic activity gains in these data centers and AI and all that stuff that's being built by big tech, and that's like it. And besides that, this economy's in a recession. You're losing jobs basically in every other sector. And I mean that, to me, that is a sign of a quite a weak economy. That's hard to just. That feels more than just like a blip. I don't know. Maybe that's wrong.
- [14:02]
Sarah Longwell
I mean, I don't think we know. And I don't think we will know until we get. I mean, I do. We're doing breaking news because this is a big story. Not just the jobs numbers, the revisions and then the firing over the revisions. Like, this is a. This is a bigger deal than however big a deal you think it is. It's a bigger deal.
- [14:19]
Tim Miller
Yeah. Right. It's not just from one random month where it's like, you know, it goes up, it goes down.
- [14:23]
Sarah Longwell
That's right.
- [14:24]
Tim Miller
Real bad signs here. Fundamentals about the economy, I guess, is my point. And also some really scary signs about just like the authoritarian creep.
- [14:34]
Sarah Longwell
Well, you know, you think about Donald Trump and how the economy's always been his strongest suit. And in fact, he was elected. I mean, people held their nose. Some groups of people. There's people who obviously like him because of all of his moral failings, but for a lot of people, they overlook the moral failings. And I hear this in focus groups all the time. He's a businessman. I liked the economy back before COVID you know, when he was running it. And I just think he's going to lower costs. So Trump's entire stake, but he is. He's currently minus 12.4%. He's way underwater on his handling of the economy with voters. That's according to Nate Silver's aggregator. And so he will do anything to protect the idea that he is the man who can handle this economy. He's already doing probably so, like, he's the one who's got everything to lose on these numbers. And if we do slide into a recession, a Trump session, like, he knows that's what cooks him more than anything.
- [15:29]
Tim Miller
But also. And also, I guess I agree with all that, although the one thing I would add to that is he knows that's what could cook him. He also knows that he's been pretty successful in gaslighting people and telling them that bad things are actually good. And, you know, to me, this. This firing at Labor Statistics is. You know, we're not. It's not. It isn't a January 6th level. It isn't. It's not the steel level, but it's kind of like it's the playbook. Right. Like, what was he doing after he lost the election? 2020 is doing everything possible to tell everybody, no, actually, I won up to and including the storming of the Capitol. Right. And I think that will be what happens if the economy really continues to sour is potentially the drone Powell firing and potentially anything else. Any other lever at his disposal to propagandize the public and try to tell them that not to believe their lying eyes and that things are actually, the economy is actually good and it's just these bad people that are, you know, trying to whatever, sully the golden age.
- [16:33]
Sarah Longwell
Yeah. And here's, here's the other thing I'll add to that, which is like this is manufacturing lost in this jobs report. It lost like 11,000 jobs. That's before these tariffs have really hit. Like Donald Trump is tacoing on tariffs as we speak. Like last night he did an executive order and in the dead of night saying I'm giving another seven day thing, another seven days for people to come and negotiate with me. Otherwise we're doing the 15 to 40%, you know, blanket tariffs. So these manufacturing jobs and the job losses are in there before the tariffs have really started to hit in a major way. And so I do wonder what it's going to do to his tacoing on tariffs because with jobs numbers like these and economy slowing like this, I, I'm not sure he can risk. I mean, the market's going down. I'm not going to use the market too much but like all the longer term trends are really going in the wrong direction.
- [17:26]
Tim Miller
All right, that's Sarah Longwell. We'll be back for more as we have any, any other breaking news. And keep an eye on what else is happening from Donald Trump.
- [17:36]
Sarah Longwell
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