by Roger Kimball
The left cheered a weak jobs report—until Trump fired the stats chief, touted native-born job gains, and doubled down on his America First economic overhaul.
Many people described the jobs report that dropped from the Bureau of Labor Statistics on August 1 as “disappointing.”
But it wasn’t disappointing for the left and other anti-Trump redoubts. On the contrary, it was cause for celebration. Experts had expected the economy to add 110,000 jobs in July. It added only 73,000. Cue images of “The Scream” by Edvard Munch. Moreover, the robust reports from May and June were revised downwards by 285,000. Of course, bad news for Trump was good news for the denizens of the anti-Trump fever swamps.
But the joy was short-lived. Trump himself quickly weighed in to describe the numbers as “rigged.” He also noted that Dr. Erika McEntarfer, the Commissioner of Labor Statistics, drastically overstated job growth in March 2024 and then again in August and September, just before the 2024 presidential election. Those numbers were subsequently revised downwards by 828,000 and 112,000, respectively.
Trump concluded that McEntarfer had “faked the jobs numbers” and promptly fired her. Whether or not that was politic—or, more to the point, whether it was good politics—is perhaps a question worth considering. It was music to the ears of the anti-Trump squadrons, however, since it gave them something else to complain about. Professional anti-Trumper Anne Applebaum, for example, reposted a critical comment by Pete Buttigieg (remember him?), charging that Trump’s behavior was “very Soviet, except that Stalin then arrested and executed the statisticians.” Portraying Trump as Stalin is a change from the usual Trump as Hitler comparison, though it’s not exactly an upgrade.
I think there are essentially two things to be said about this jobs report.
First, notwithstanding the tocsins of anti-Trump fury, the report wasn’t really that bad. The left seized on it as one shred of possibly lukewarm economic news in the midst of an ocean of upbeat news—the deals with countries across the globe, the taming of inflation, unemployment hovering just above 4%, and the billions of dollars already realized through Trump’s tariffs: it presents a very robust picture overall.
I think Senator John Kennedy got it right when he noted that “This jobs report isn’t perfect, but I wouldn’t trade America’s economy today for that of any other country, thanks to President Trump.” Indeed. “To put things in perspective,” Kennedy said, “we had 9% inflation under President Biden only a few years ago.” Today? Inflation is about 2.5%.
Moreover, something that the jobs report fails to register is that most of the jobs lost are either foreign-born or government workers. Native-born workers, as this chart shows, “continue to make exceptional gains and real wage growth under Trump.”
As one forthright commentator noted, “The idiots on the left and the fake news media are calling the July Jobs Report a ‘disaster,’” but when you drill down, a different story emerges. The number of jobs for native-born American workers went up by 383,000, while the number of foreign-born workers went down by 1,500,000 since April. Remember, too, that we have just seen the fourth straight month of an “illegal labor purge.”
All of this, I would say, is encouraging. But it—and this is the second thing to be said about the August 1 jobs report—it is important to place it in the context of the large shift in the U.S. economy that Trump is endeavoring to bring about. The tariffs, the “America First” rhetoric and policies, and the twin initiatives to seal the border and deport the people who are here illegally: all this is part of an effort to reorient the U.S. economy away from the sugar high of globalist debt and spending, and back to the ethic of “Made in America.”
The policies designed to encourage the return of manufacturing to the U.S. will help whittle at the gargantuan federal debt (now approaching $37 trillion) and also put upward pressure on the wages of U.S. workers. Consumer prices will rise, but so will middle- and working-class wages.
This is part of what Trump promised to bring about during his campaign for president: to make sure that the forgotten and maligned American worker would be forgotten no more. It’s what millions of people voted for. It won’t happen without some disruption, but so far, the transition is being managed with consummate skill by Trump and his economic lieutenants, Scott Bessent, Secretary of the Treasury, and Howard Lutnick, Secretary of Commerce. It is nice to see the promises that were made on the campaign trail being kept.
Roger Kimball is editor and publisher of The New Criterion and the president and publisher of Encounter Books. He is the author and editor of many books, including The Fortunes of Permanence: Culture and Anarchy in an Age of Amnesia (St. Augustine's Press), The Rape of the Masters (Encounter), Lives of the Mind: The Use and Abuse of Intelligence from Hegel to Wodehouse (Ivan R. Dee), and Art's Prospect: The Challenge of Tradition in an Age of Celebrity (Ivan R. Dee). Most recently, he edited and contributed to Where Next? Western Civilization at the Crossroads (Encounter) and contributed to Against the Great Reset: Eighteen Theses Contra the New World Order (Bombardier).
Source: https://amgreatness.com/2025/08/03/bad-news-is-good-news-the-lefts-premature-celebration-over-jobs-data/
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