‘Stunning’: Erin Burnett flattens Trump in scathing takedown of 'unprecedented' move

CNN's Erin Burnett scorched President Donald Trump on Friday evening, saying he "fired the messenger" when he booted a top official responsible for releasing job numbers he didn't like.

Trump fired a Bureau of Labor Statistics official earlier in the day, ordering the dismissal of Erika McEntarfer, the agency's commissioner, after she released a July jobs report that showed much weaker-than-expected employment growth and large downward revisions to job numbers for May and June. Trump baselessly accused McEntarfer, a Biden appointee, of manipulating the data for political reasons.

Burnett tore into the president to open her show, "OutFront."

"It is a stunning and unprecedented move in the United States, coming just hours after the Bureau of Labor Statistics — which is, around the world, the most trusted gold standard of jobs reporting — issued a report that revised job growth, showing that job growth in the United States had slowed to a near halt over the past three months," she said.

She played a clip of Trump saying he thought the job numbers were "wrong" and that the report was "rigged." Burnett noted that McEntarfer is a 20-year government veteran who was confirmed by the Senate with overwhelming bipartisan support — including that of then-Sen. JD Vance (R-OH).

"And to be clear, her termination tonight is for political reasons. There’s no evidence the jobs numbers were manipulated, as Trump is claiming. There is no one credible or serious who’s saying any such thing," she railed.

Burnett minced no words when describing the job's report.

"Today’s report was bad. It did show bad numbers. Not because the numbers were cooked, but because there was weakening in the economy in large part over that three-month period, with all the uncertainty and the constantly changing tariffs and threat of 160% tariffs at some point, because of the tariffs."

Burnett repeated that everything that's happened in the jobs report directly stems from "Trump's own doing."

"But of course, tonight, he’s firing the messenger," she said.

Burnett pointed to the administration cheering a "June boom" when it liked the numbers. She flagged former Press Secretary Sean Spicer's comments about jobs numbers that paint a flattering picture of Trump:

“I talked to the president prior to this, and he said, to quote him very clearly: 'They may have been phony in the past, but it’s very real now.'"

"Of course, everyone laughed then. Harder to laugh about things like that now," Burnett lamented. "The truth is: they weren’t phony before Trump took office the first time. They aren’t phony now. They weren’t phony when he was in office and casting doubt on the Bureau of Labor Statistics — which is relied upon in the United States and, frankly, around the world by government, private entities, businesses. All around the world. That kind of rhetoric can destroy trust in American institutions and in government statistics, which threatens the very core of what makes America the greatest, biggest, and most respected economy in the world."

The BLS, she added, is an independent agency with hundreds of workers involved in that data.

"You can’t rig and cook the books," she said, before scolding the president for casting doubt on them.

"He should be proud that the United States has the most respected numbers and statistics people believe in — unlike China, where they say, 'Oh, things are so great,' and nobody believes them. Because they know the numbers aren't real there."

Watch Burnett's takedown below or at this link.