President Donald Trump's administration got bad news on Friday, with the release of a worse-than-expected jobs report showing 92,000 jobs lost and unemployment ticking up to 4.4 percent. But his top officials are scrambling to spin it away, reported The New Republic — blaming anything but Trump's policies and emphasizing, often with fuzzy math, that Trump is still in the black on jobs.
Kevin Hassett, Trump's director for the National Economic Council, led the tone of the rhetoric in an interview on CNBC.
"Hassett blamed a spate of severe winter weather, a massive strike at a major health care provider in California and Hawaii, and a recent update to the BLS’s birth-death model that tracks the opening and closing of businesses," reported Edith Olmsted. He also argued that the numbers should be averaged with previous months, saying, “If you take the average over a few months we had a surprisingly positive one last month, and a surprisingly negative one this one, but on average it’s about what we expect to be seeing because immigration has gone down so much the break-even employment is probably in the 30 or 40,000 jobs a month range.”
Secretary of Labor Lori Chavez-DeRemer, who has lately been embroiled in scandals over inappropriate behavior with subordinates and misuse of public resources, made similar claims, the report noted.
Speaking to Fox Business, Chavez-DeRemer "also tried to blame the 'bad report' on weather and the strike, before just blatantly lying about the publicly available numbers. 'That has been resolved, so we’re hoping to see those numbers tick back up next month,' Chavez-DeRemer said ... 'But overall, we’ve gained 60,000 new jobs over the last two months,'" wrote Olmsted, who noted, "In reality, the latest report saw 126,000 jobs added in January, and 92,000 taken away in February. That’s just 31,000 new jobs. Either Chavez-DeRemer is too stupid to do the math, or she thinks you are."
Trump's tariffs are broadly agreed by economists to have been a drag on the economy for a year, and his new invasion of Iran risks another surge of inflation as oil markets spiral into chaos.