On Friday morning, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released the latest employment report, and the news was deeply discouraging. Hours later, Donald Trump was asked for his reaction.
At that point, the president had a few options: He could’ve dodged the question. He also could’ve asked for Americans’ patience and argued there are better days ahead. He could’ve tried to make excuses for his failures.
But the president did none of these things. At a White House event, the Republican instead did what he tends to do on economic matters: Trump played make-believe.
When a reporter asked for his response to the data, the president said the deeply discouraging jobs report was “amazing,” adding that the “employment numbers are very good.”
That’s demonstrably ridiculous.
I’m mindful of the fact that Trump doesn’t appear to know very much about economic policy or recent history, but White House officials have described him as a “visual learner,” so I’ve updated a chart showing job growth by year since the Great Recession, with red columns representing Republican administrations and blue columns representing Democratic administrations.
That small red column on the right side of the image? That’s 2025, when the U.S. job market added 584,000 jobs for the whole year. That might sound like a decent number until you compare it to recent history: In 2024, when Trump said the economy was terrible, job growth topped two million. A year earlier, the total was almost 2.6 million jobs.
I saw some headlines on Friday that told the public that 2025 was the worst for U.S. job creation since the Covid-19 pandemic. That’s true, but it understates matters. If we exclude 2020 because of the havoc Covid wreaked on the global economy, the first year of Trump’s second term was the worst for job creation since 2009. What’s more, if we exclude years in which the economy fell into recession, 2025 was the worst year for U.S. jobs since 2003. For American workers, this is awful, but for the president’s political standing, it’s a disaster: Trump spent the 2024 election season assuring voters that he’d deliver an economic “boom,” starting on “Day One” of his second term. Trump, after having failed spectacularly to deliver on those promises, has tried to rebrand failure as “amazing.” No one should be fooled by such nonsense.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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