While President Donald Trump has a habit of blaming unflattering news on anyone but himself, according to a new analysis from MS NOW, he has seemingly taken responsibility for a recent uptick in inflation, but "in the clumsiest way possible."
After holding back a new jobs report and blaming the recent government shutdown, the Trump administration last week finally released one with a rough outlook on the state of the job market. According to the report's findings, unemployment reached 4.6 percent in November, a level not seen in four years.
Job growth also slowed to a crawl, with the 64,000 new jobs created in November doing little to offset the 105,000 lost in November. In his analysis for MS NOW, network contributor and Rachel Maddow producer Steve Benen said this level of growth had not been seen since the Great Recession.
In his piece from Monday, Benen highlighted a Truth Social post from Trump on Friday morning, in which he seemed admit responsibility for the rise in unemployment, "in the clumsiest way possible," while also misrepresenting key facts and trying to spin the news as not-so-bad.
"The only reason our Unemployment ticked up to 4.5 percent is because we are reducing the Government Workforce by numbers that have never been seen before," Trump's post read. "I wish the Fake News would report the 4.5 percent correctly."
"And I wish the president could describe reality correctly," Benen wrote. "In this case, he misstated the unemployment rate (it’s 4.6 percent, not 4.5 percent), and the rate increase is not solely the result of losses in public-sector employment."
Trump seems keen on this particular spin, Benen noted, as he later repeated it in a White House address. He also later claimed during an event in North Carolina that the laid-off government workers were moving on to jobs in the private sector. Benen punctured this argument as well, noting that private sector hiring in 2025 could "charitably be described as anemic."
"If private-sector job growth were soaring, the White House might be able to argue that the administration’s calculus was part of a coherent economic strategy, in which workers shifted from one sector to another," Benen wrote. "To be sure, this wouldn’t be a great argument — government employees are doing work that needs to be done that isn’t done by private businesses — but it would at least be worth some discussion. But job growth in the private sector can charitably be described as anemic in 2025, and it’s been especially awful since April, after the president announced his 'Liberation Day' trade tariffs."
The Wall Street Journal editorial board came to similar conclusions in a recent piece, blaming Trump's "willy-nilly" tariff policies for causing manufacturing job growth to slowly wither away as companies become hesitant to invest in the US.
