Peter Navarro, Senior Counselor for Trade and Manufacturing for President Donald Trump, speaks to the media outside the White House in Washington, D.C., April 30, 2025. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein
White House official Peter Navarro on Tuesday braced the markets for a "weak" impending jobs report, urging them to keep expectations "down significantly" while also pointing the blame elsewhere besides Donald Trump's policies.
Navarro serves as Trump's senior counselor for trade and manufacturing, and is noted as one of the biggest boosters in the administration of the president's wide-ranging tariff policy. During a Tuesday appearance on Fox Business, Navarro suggested that people should temper their expectations for the new jobs report set to release on Wednesday.
The jobs report’s going to come out tomorrow. We have to revise our expectations down significantly for what a monthly job number should look like," Navarro told host Maria Bartiromo.
He also asserted that the impending poor number will be the result of Trump's mass deportation agenda, while also claiming, with no evidence, that all of the jobs created during Joe Biden's presidency were given to undocumented immigrants. Biden-era job creation reports regularly reached the six-figure range, while tomorrow's number is expected to be around 50,000, which Navarro attempted to spin as a positive.
"When we were letting in 2 million illegal aliens… we had to produce 200,000 jobs a month for steady state. And by the way, all of the jobs that we were creating in Biden years were going to illegals,” Navarro said. “Americans were going to the unemployment lines... That’s totally reversed, and now 50,000 a month is going to be more like what we need."
He added, "So, Wall Street, when this stuff comes out, they can’t rain on that parade. They have to adjust for the fact that we’re deporting millions of illegals out of our job market."
In response, Bartiromo asked if Navarro was expecting a "weak" number.
“No,” Navarro pushed back. “Not expecting a weak number. I’m just saying that going forward, when we see a number under 100,000, we don’t wring our hands. We say, ‘Yeah, that’s going to be steady state,’ so it’s all good, Maria.”
Meanwhile, in a Monday statement to investors, JPMorgan's chief global strategist David Kelly gave a much grimmer forecast for the economy, which he said was beset with "soggy consumption, weak job gains and a sour public mood.
"In short, while the stock market is booming and tech sector capital spending is soaring, much of the real economy remains very slow," Kelly said, and further quoted Wall Street analyst Albert Edwards as saying, "We are again in a Peter Pan world where an exuberant Wall Street is propping up the real economy. Things could get interesting very quickly."