MS NOW analyst Steve Benen said the Trump administration’s “strong” jobs report suggests they don’t know what “strong” means.
“White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt’s credibility couldn’t get much worse,” Benen wrote on Wednesday, pointing to Leavitt’s false claim that President Donald Trump created the slogan “drill, baby, drill and that “many states” are now seeing gas prices below $2 per gallon.
“But the whopper that stood out for me came earlier in the day, when she issued a written statement about the latest monthly jobs data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics,” said Benen.
“The strong jobs report shows how President Trump is fixing the damage caused by Joe Biden and creating a strong, America First economy in record time,” Leavitt said, which prompted Benen to say “there may be some confusion about what ‘strong’ means.”
“The latest jobs report, released Tuesday morning, was quite awful,” Benen argued. “The U.S. unemployment rate has reached its highest level in more than four years, and job growth has slowed to a level that could charitably be described as anemic.”
In fact, a chart showing month-to-month changes to the job market since November 2020, when Trump lost his reelection bid to Biden, reveals significant growth out of the red. The Biden administration, comparatively, swam in a sea of high job growth throughout his four years — followed by a quick dip back into a Trump-style low-growth red zone as Trump returned to office in January of 2025.
“Indeed, the closer one looks, the worse the American job market appears,” said Benen. “According to the latest data, the economy actually lost jobs in June, August and October. When was the last time the U.S. economy had a net job loss three times in six months? Late 2009 into early 2010, when the job market was still trying to recover from the Great Recession.”
Worse, when Trump announced his Liberation Day trade tariffs in April, the nation had created a total of 119,000 jobs, per month, since he entered office, Benen said. But last year — when Trump said the economy was awful — the U.S. job market averaged nearly 168,000 jobs per month. This compares to Trump’s average 17,000 jobs per month.
“In fact, we remain very much on track to see the worst year for job creation since the Great Recession (excluding the massive losses associated with the pandemic in 2020),” said Benen. “If the president’s team looked at this data and saw a ‘strong’ jobs report, that might help explain why Trump is failing so spectacularly: The White House doesn’t even know what success looks like.”
Read the MS NOW report at this link.