Trump’s Outrageous Lies About Jobs Numbers Exposed

Summary

Bulwark Takes: Trump’s Outrageous Lies About Jobs Numbers Exposed

Host: Will Saletan
Release Date: August 3, 2025

In this compelling episode of Bulwark Takes, host Will Saletan delves deep into former President Donald Trump's persistent and unfounded claims surrounding the United States' job numbers. Through meticulous analysis of recent events and historical context, Saletan exposes the inconsistencies and manipulations propagated by Trump to undermine governmental institutions and sway public opinion.

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1. The Authoritarian Warning

[00:00] Will Saletan:
Saletan opens the discussion by drawing parallels between recent governmental actions and authoritarian regimes. He states, “if you are a citizen or resident of the United States, you are living in an authoritarian country,” highlighting the suppression of information and the firing of officials who report inconvenient truths. This sets the tone for the episode's exploration of Trump's tactics to distort economic data.

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2. Trump's Attack on the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS)

Saletan outlines the immediate trigger for Trump’s latest assault on the Bureau of Labor Statistics. When the BLS reported a downward revision in job numbers—indicating fewer jobs were created than initially reported—Trump reacted vehemently. He took to his social media platform, Truth Social, to accuse Dr. Erica McIntarfer, the BLS Commissioner and a Biden appointee, of fabricating job data to aid Kamala Harris’s 2024 presidential campaign.

Key Claims by Trump:

• Fabrication of Job Numbers: “The jobs numbers are being produced by a Biden appointee, Dr. Erica McIntarfer, who faked them to boost Kamala Harris's chances of victory.”
• Immediate Consequences: “I have directed my team to fire this Biden political appointee immediately.”

Saletan underscores the irony in Trump's accusations, noting that while he previously decried BLS revisions as manipulative, he now undermines the integrity of the same agency when it presents data unfavorable to him.

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3. Unraveling the 2024 Job Numbers Revision

To assess Trump's credibility, Saletan examines the timing and context of the BLS's 2024 job numbers revision. He references the press release dated August 21, 2024, which was two and a half months before the November election, coinciding with the Democratic National Convention. This timing was particularly detrimental to Harris's campaign, providing Trump with a potent narrative against the administration.

Saletan's Analysis:

• Trump's Narrative: Accused the BLS of delaying the revision until after the election to harm Republican prospects.
• Actual Timing: The revision occurred on August 21, 2024, before the election, contradicting Trump's claims that it happened on November 15, 2024.

Saletan emphasizes that Trump's misrepresentation of the timeline is a fabrication intended to perpetuate distrust in the BLS and bolster his anti-administration rhetoric.

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4. Consistent Misinformation Strategy

Saletan points out Trump's pattern of misinformation regarding job numbers:

• 2020 Election Claims: Trump previously alleged that job numbers were "rigged" against him during the 2020 election.
• 2024 Claims: Similar accusations were made about job numbers being advantageous to Kamala Harris, only to later invert his stance when new data emerged.

Saletan's Observation:
“Trump doesn't have a principled objection to revising the job numbers. His only rule is the revised numbers are real when they're about Democrats and they're fake when they're about him.”

This cyclical pattern of denial and inversion underscores Trump's strategy to maintain an unfaltering base by dismissing inconvenient truths while asserting unwavering control over public narratives.

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5. The Role of Apparatchiks: Kevin Hassett's Defense

Central to Saletan’s critique is the concept of apparatchiks—loyal bureaucrats who defend authoritarian leaders’ actions unquestioningly. Kevin Hassett, the Director of the White House National Economic Council and a potential candidate to replace Jerome Powell as Federal Reserve Chairman, exemplifies this phenomenon.

Hassett's Defense in Interviews:

• Meet the Press ([08:01] Will Saletan): Kristen Welker: “Does the administration have any evidence that it was rigged? As the President said, will you be presenting that to the American public?”

  Kevin Hassett: “The revisions are hard evidence. For example, there was an 818,000 revision making the Joe Biden job record a lot worse… There have been a bunch of patterns that could make people wonder if there's a partisan pattern in the data.”

• Fox News Sunday ([09:08] Will Saletan): Shannon Bream: Prompted Hassett to respond to Trump’s statement about phony job numbers.

  Kevin Hassett: “When the data are unreliable… there are going to be people that wonder if there's a partisan pattern in the data. … It showed that the Joe Biden jobs record was a lot worse than people thought…”

Saletan criticizes Hassett for knowingly ignoring the true detrimental timing of the 2024 revision, choosing instead to fabricate a narrative that implicates partisan bias unrelated to the actual events.

Saletan's Critique:

• Dishonesty: Hassett is aware that the job number revision in August was timed to disadvantage Harris but falsely attributes it to post-campaign dynamics.
• Supporting Authoritarianism: By defending Trump’s unfounded claims without evidence, Hassett perpetuates misinformation and undermines institutional integrity.

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6. Implications for Democratic Institutions and Governance

Saletan warns of the broader dangers posed by figures like Hassett within the government. By allowing apparatchiks to thrive, the administration risks eroding public trust in essential institutions like the BLS and the Federal Reserve. This manipulation of data and public perception is emblematic of authoritarian tendencies that threaten democratic norms and the integrity of governmental bodies.

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7. Conclusion: The Battle Against Authoritarianism

In wrapping up the episode, Saletan underscores the importance of holding individuals like Kevin Hassett accountable to preserve the sanctity of governmental institutions. He emphasizes that combating authoritarianism involves not only preventing the rise of autocratic leaders but also ensuring that loyalist bureaucrats do not perpetuate lies and undermine democratic processes.

Final Takeaway:
“To ensure the resilience of democracy, it's crucial to remove apparatchiks who defend lies and to protect the independence and credibility of our governmental institutions.”

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Notable Quotes:

• Will Saletan [00:00]: "If you are a citizen or resident of the United States, you are living in an authoritarian country."
• Donald Trump [04:23]: "The Harris Biden administration has been caught fraudulently manipulating job statistics to hide the true extent of the economic ruin that they've inflicted on America."
• Kevin Hassett [08:01]: "There have been a bunch of patterns that could make people wonder if there's a partisan pattern in the data."
• Kevin Hassett [09:15]: "When the data are unreliable... there are going to be people that wonder if there's a partisan pattern in the data."

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This episode of Bulwark Takes serves as a crucial exposé on the manipulative tactics employed by Trump and his loyalists to distort economic realities and erode trust in key governmental institutions. Saletan’s thorough analysis provides listeners with a clear understanding of the mechanisms of misinformation and the importance of safeguarding democratic integrity against authoritarian influences.

Transcript

[Will Saletan]

Hey, it's Will Saletan from the Bulwark. Unfortunately, I'm here to tell you about the latest sign that if you are a citizen or resident of the United States, you are living in an authoritarian country. So what happens in authoritarian countries? Well, one thing that happens is when there is information that the government doesn't like, they suppress it or they fire the people who reported it. And that just happened. So on Friday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported what they call a downward revision in. In the job numbers, meaning that they thought there were more jobs being created than actually turned out to be the case. And when they looked more carefully at the numbers, they ratcheted them down. When this happened, Donald Trump went ballistic. Now, first thing he did was he went on Truth Social and he posted this. Okay, so what he says here is the jobs numbers are being produced by a Biden appointee, Dr. Erica McIntarfer, the commissioner of Labor Statistics, who faked. He says she faked the jobs numbers before the election to try and boost Kamala Harris's chances of victory. That's. She's. He's talking about what happened in 2024, last year when Kamala Harris was running for president. He says the bureau faked the job numbers to help Kamala. And Trump says, I have directed my team to fire this Biden political appointee immediately. And notice, he says, she manipulated for political purposes, the commissioner manipulated the data. And he followed it up with this post, also on Truth Social, today's jobs numbers. Now, he's talking not about 2024. The ones that just came out were rigged. Rigged. Remember that word that he uses for the 2020, 2020 election? He always says numbers were rigged against him. He says these job numbers also were rigged against him to make the Republicans and me look bad, just like when they had three great days around the 2024 presidential election. Again, he's talking about what happened with Harris. And then those numbers were, quote, taken away on November 15, 2024, right after the election, when the job numbers were massively revised. Okay? And you can see there that he cites exactly how many jobs were revised down in that 2024 episode. 818,000. Remember that number? So that was Trump's story. Just before the election, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, bls, reported that the job numbers were good to help Kamala Harris. And then on November 15, 2024, he says they revised the numbers downward. So the first question is, is that true? Did they go up before the election and then down after? So here is what actually happened before the 2024 election. Here is the press release that was issued last year by BLS announcing that downward revision. You'll notice that this is the revision Trump was talking about in his Truth social post. He said the revision was 818,000 jobs. And there it is in the release, 818,000. So when did this happen? Check out the date on the press release. It's not November 15th as Trump says it was. It was August 21st, 2024. That is two and a half months before the election. In fact, do you know what was happening on August 21? The Democratic National Convention. That's what was happening. And guess what Was happening on August 22? The next day, this Vice President of the United States of America, Kamala Harris. That's right. This was literally the day before. Kamala Harris was about to give the most important speech of her campaign. And the BLS put out this revision, taking away 818,000 jobs at the worst possible time for her. And therefore, it was an absolute gift to the guy she was running against, which was Donald Trump. So what did Donald Trump say about that revision when it happened? Here's what he said later that day, August 21, 2024, at a rally in North Carolina.

[Donald Trump]

The Harris Biden administration has been caught fraudulently manipulating job statistics to hide the true extent of the economic ruin that they've inflicted on America. The new data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that the administration padded the numbers with an extra. Listen to this one. 818,000 jobs that don't exist.

[Will Saletan]

So that was Trump's take on the revision in 2024. He said Harris and Biden had manipulated the job numbers, but the manipulation wasn't in the new numbers. It wasn't in the revision. It was in the old numbers. Trump said the new lower numbers from the BLS were the truth, and they showed that the previous higher numbers were wrong. So this week, when BLS did the same thing and revised down the job numbers, Trump flipped. I mean, he didn't just flip like he flipped out. He flipped his take. He said the old numbers were real and the new numbers were fake. So Trump doesn't have a principled objection to revising the job numbers. His only rule is the revised numbers are real when they're about Democrats and they're fake when they're about him. So when you look at the actual press release from the BLS in August 2024, and when you watch what Trump said about it, it's very clear that the story he told in those truth social posts on Friday was bogus. The revisions didn't. Didn't happen after the election on November 15. They happened three months before the election. So you might figure that Trump stopped telling that story about November 15th, right? Not hardly. Okay, here's what Trump told reporters at the White House after he had posted that he was firing the BLS commissioner.

[Donald Trump]

Days before the election. She came out with these beautiful numbers for Kamala, I guess Biden, slash Kamala. And she came out with these beautiful numbers trying to get somebody else elected. Then right after the election, I think on the 15th, November 15th, she had an 8 or $900,000 massive reduction.

[Will Saletan]

Same story, same lie. Okay, so we know Trump is a liar. We also know Trump is an authoritarian. But the thing about authoritarians is they need people around them to parrot their lies. They need an army of people, bureaucrats who will do whatever they say and will justify whatever the authoritarian does. And in an authoritarian regime, these people are often known as apparatchiks. The apparatchik is someone who, whatever the boss says, I will come out and defend it, justify it, rationalize it, excuse it. So Trump has many of these people, and I'm going to show you one of them. This is Kevin Hassett, the director of the White House National Economic Council. So since Trump fired the BLS commissioner, Hassett, who is up, he's being considered to be chairman of the Federal Reserve. Like, if Trump fires Jerome Powell, Kevin Hassett is one of the first people. People as potentially replacing Powell. So Hassett has given three TV interviews since the firing, defending the firing and defending Trump's false allegation that the numbers were fishy. Now, I'm going to show you two of these interviews. Here's what Kristen Welker asked Hassett today on Meet the Press. Do you have. Does the administration have any evidence that it was rigged? As the President said, will you be presenting that to the American public? And here's how Hassett answered that question.

[Kevin Hassett]

The revisions are hard evidence. For example, there was a 818,000 revision making the Joe Biden job record a lot worse. That came out after he withdrew from the presidential campaign. There have been a bunch of patterns that could make people wonder.

[Will Saletan]

Did you catch that? Hassett knows that the downward revision in 2024 happened to before the election. So he knows that Trump's story is bull. But instead of acknowledging that, Hassett says the revision was after Joe Biden dropped out. That is unbelievably dishonest, because Hassett knows that the timing of the announcement on the day before Kamala Harris's convention speech absolutely screwed her. But he pretends, Hassett pretends that the timing was favorable to the Democrats because it was a month after Joe Biden dropped out, which is totally irrelevant. And here's Hassett giving a similar answer on Fox News Sunday. The host, Shannon Bream asked him to respond to this statement from Trump about the new job numbers.

[Donald Trump]

I believe the numbers were phony, just like they were before the election.

[Will Saletan]

And here's what Hassett said in response.

[Kevin Hassett]

Look, the fact is that when the data are unreliable, when they keep being revised all over the place, then there are going to be people that wonder if there's a partisan pattern in the data. And so if you look back to just a year ago, for example, there was another massive revision from the bls, almost a million jobs, a million jobs down, that said that the Joe Biden jobs record was a lot worse than people thought. But we didn't get the downward revision until after Joe Biden had dropped out.

[Will Saletan]

That is the same sleazy answer that Hassett gave on Meet the Press. And then he has the gall to claim that because the revision happened after Biden dropped out, which, again, is irrelevant, it showed a, quote, partisan pattern. And then Hassett added this.

[Kevin Hassett]

They have this little black box that moves the numbers around and makes people wonder sometimes with partisan patterns. And so I think what we need is a fresh set of eyes at the bls.

[Will Saletan]

Hassett is sending a signal to Donald Trump that he will defend anything Donald Trump does, including firing a public servant for giving you, the American public, correct information about the economy. So it's one thing to make sure that Donald Trump's powers are limited and to make sure that we never again elect an authoritarian president, but it's also important that we make sure that apparatchiks like Kevin Hassett never work in government again. See you next time.