The White House’s celebration of the weak job market makes no sense

[Thiệu Ngô]

Job growth in the first year of Donald Trump’s second term is on pace to be the worst since the Great Recession. So why is his team bragging?

By Steve Benen

The job numbers for September were significantly delayed by the recent government shutdown, but when the data finally reached the public, the White House appeared eager to celebrate. Press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a written statement issued to news organizations:

The September jobs report more than doubled market expectations — adding 119,000 new jobs to the American economy. In stark contrast to the disastrous Biden economy, almost all of these new jobs were in the private sector and went to American-born workers instead of illegal aliens. … This strong report is more proof that President Trump’s pro-growth, America First agenda is already making great progress, and it will continue to deliver positive results for American families and businesses.

Someone who didn’t know better might see this and think the U.S. job market is in great shape. Reality tells a very different story.

Some of the details in Leavitt’s statement, for example, were a mess. The Biden economy that Team Trump inherited, for example, was pretty great, not “disastrous.” Similarly, there’s nothing wrong with public sector jobs.

Even the top-line takeaway wasn’t quite right: The White House might consider 119,000 new jobs in September evidence of “great progress,” but this total fails to keep up with population growth, and it pales in comparison to the kind of monthly totals we saw during Joe Biden’s term.

And while the details from the White House were wrong, the bigger picture is worse.

Job growth in the first year of Donald Trump’s second term is on pace to be the worst since the Great Recession (excluding 2020, when the pandemic wreaked havoc on the economy). We’re also seeing increased corporate layoffs and weak retail hiring as the holiday season approaches.

What’s more, the unemployment rate has reached a four-year high, job openings are at a four-year low, and leading members of Trump’s own economic team have gone so far as to concede in recent weeks that parts of the U.S. economy are already in recession.

Confronted with these facts, the White House press secretary boasted that Trump’s “America First agenda is already making great progress.” If the goal was to make the nation’s job market worse, then yes, the administration’s “progress” is remarkable. But if the point was to improve economic conditions, Leavitt and her colleagues appear to have things backward.

As the so-called Trump slump continues, the White House’s strategy appears to be rooted in the idea that the president and his team can simply play make-believe and sell the public on an alternative reality in which Americans “have the greatest economy we’ve ever had.”

The latest polling suggests the strategy is failing badly, but Leavitt’s reaction to the latest employment report makes clear that the White House intends to keep telling the public not to believe what is plainly true: Trump’s agenda isn’t working.