It’s Trump’s Economy. Trump Kills Job Growth

Sep 5, 2025 05:58 PM EDT, Fri

U.S. job growth turns ugly over the summer as Trump’s economic agenda falters

As MSNBC’s Ali Velshi summarized, “Turns out firing the ref doesn’t change the score.”

Sept. 5, 2025, 8:57 AM EDT By Steve Benen

Expectations heading into this week showed projections of about 75,000 new jobs having been added in the United States in August. As it turns out, according to the new report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the totals fell short of those expectations. CNBC News reported:

Job creation sputtered in August, adding to recent signs of labor market weakening and likely keeping the Federal Reserve on track for a widely anticipated interest rate cut later this month. Nonfarm payrolls increased by just 22,000 for the month, while the unemployment rate rose to 4.3%, according to a Bureau of Labor Statistics report Friday.

While the data from August was ugly, just as important were the revisions from June and July, which were down a combined 21,000 jobs compared with earlier, preliminary reporting. This included a rare negative month: The revisions showed the economy lost 13,000 in June.

Donald Trump recently boasted, in reference to economic data, “We’re seeing phenomenal numbers. … I mean, really phenomenal numbers.”

I wish that were true. It’s not.

While every new U.S. jobs report generates global attention, this one was of particular interest because after last month’s data was released, Trump decided to fire the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics — not because she’d done anything wrong, but because the president was annoyed by his own failures and — in true authoritarian fashion — took out his frustrations on Erika McEntarfer.

But as MSNBC’s Ali Velshi summarized, “Turns out firing the ref doesn’t change the score.”

Over the first eight months of 2025, the latest data suggests the economy has added 598,000 jobs. That might sound like a decent number, but over the first eight months of 2024 — when Trump said the economy was terrible — the total was over 1.1 million jobs, and over the first eight months of 2023, the U.S. economy added more than 1.8 million jobs.

In fact, if we exclude 2020, when the pandemic wreaked havoc on the economy, the first eight months of this year show the slowest job growth in the U.S. since 2009, when the economy was still hemorrhaging jobs from the Great Recession.

When trying to boast about the economy, the White House routinely references what it calls the “Trump Effect.” The latest job data, coupled with sluggish growth and stubborn inflation, suggests this “effect” simply isn’t working.

Indeed, the question the president and his team ought to face is simple: “If Trump has created a ‘hot’ economy, why has American job growth slowed to a 16-year low?”

This post updates our related earlier coverage.

Steve Benen is a producer for “The Rachel Maddow Show,” the editor of MaddowBlog and an MSNBC political contributor. He’s also the bestselling author of “Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans’ War on the Recent Past.”

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