The Official "Damned Trump" Thread: Phase II

[Angrboda]

Guardian : Trump offers wildly false claim about job numbers released before 2024 election to defend firing of labor statistics chief

Speaking to reporters on Friday, Donald Trump defended his decision to fire Erika McEntarfer, the commissioner of labor statistics, and falsely accused her of having released reports just before the 2024 election that overstated the number of new jobs created by the Biden-Harris administration.

Asked by a reporter, “Why did you fire the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics?” Trump replied: “Because I think her numbers were wrong, just like I thought her numbers were wrong before the election.”

The president then went on to give a wildly inaccurate account of the jobs data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics in 2024.
On Friday, Donald Trump gave reporters a wildly inaccurate account of when the bureau of labor statistics revised job numbers in 2024.

“Days before the election, she came out with these beautiful numbers for Kamala, I guess Biden-Kamala, and she came out with these beautiful numbers trying to get somebody else elected,” Trump said, entirely misrepresenting the jobs report released on 1 November 2024, four days before the election, which in fact showed the US added just 12,000 jobs over the previous month.

At the time, the Trump campaign called the jobs report “a catastrophe” that “definitively reveals how badly Kamala Harris broke our economy”.

On Friday, however, the president offered a wildly inaccurate account of the report released just nine months ago.

“Then, right after the election,” Trump claimed, “she had an 8- or 900,000 dollar [sic] massive reduction, said she made a mistake.”

What Trump was misremembering is a Bureau of Labor Statistics announcement, on 21 August 2024, that updated data showed that there had been 818,000 fewer jobs added in the US in the previous year than it had initially estimated. That downward revision was large, but part of an annual process, in which the bureau updates its initial estimates when it gets better data.

The same day that revision was announced in 2024, Trump, who was then recalibrating his campaign to focus on Kamala Harris, posted on Truth Social that the Biden-Harris administration had been “caught fraudulently manipulating Job Statistics” and the “New Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that the Administration PADDED THE NUMBERS with an extra 818,000 Jobs that DO NOT EXIST, AND NEVER DID.”

On Friday, however, Trump recited a completely inaccurate account of that history, even though it occurred just nine months ago.

Before leaving for another long weekend of golf, three days after returning from a gold trip to Scotland, Trump repeated his false claim about McEntarfer, the commissioner of labor statistics he just fired.

“Before the election,” Trump recalled, wrongly, “she gave out numbers that were so good for the Democrats, it was like unbelievable.”

“And then right after the election, she corrected those numbers with, I think, almost 900,000 correction,” he said, referring incorrectly to the revision that had taken place in August and had been a boon to his campaign.

“Well today she did the same thing, with the 253,000, whatever the number was,” Trump added, referring to McEntarfer’s last act of office: Friday’s announcement that the US economy added 258,000 fewer jobs in May and June than previously estimated.