The Trump administration has a problem. The latest jobs report showed just 22,000 jobs were added in August. Employment data for June was revised to a loss of 13,000 jobs, the first net loss since the end of 2020. The president’s economic policies aren’t likely to change, though, driven by the impulses and fantasies of a man whose tether to reality grows thinner by the day.
But in this White House, every day’s news must be characterized as a spectacular success. So what to do when the fantasy doesn’t match reality? First, you get rid of the messengers, as when Trump fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics after last month’s bad jobs report. Next, you posit a conspiracy theory, as Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick did Friday, and assure the public that once the apostates have been purged, everyone will understand what a glorious utopia Trump is creating for the country. But when it comes to the economy, there’s only so far you can get with spin to persuade people not to believe what they’re experiencing in their own lives.
Just before the new numbers were released, Lutnick told CNBC that BLS data “will get better because you’ll take out the people who are just trying to create noise against the president.”
Most Americans say they disapprove of the job Trump’s doing on the economy.
“The holdovers from the Biden administration are just bent against the president’s success,” Lutnick said. “He can’t replace somebody two weeks ago, and you expect fundamental change, but what you will get is an agency that’s on [Trump’s] side, just trying to do the best and put out the correct numbers.”
Lutnick didn’t provide any evidence for his assertion about BLS staffers’ motivations. And for his claim to be true, hundreds of people would have had to conspire to cook the books, with not a single person in the agency speaking the truth publicly.
There’s no doubt that political spin can work — the last 10 years are proof of that. But the greater the distance between reality and the story you’re telling, the less persuasive it tends to be. It’s one thing to convince the public that, say, a country is hiding weapons of mass destruction and another to tell them the economy is fine when no one is hiring.
Right now, the administration is telling a preposterous story about the economy, yet the public isn’t buying it. Most Americans say they disapprove of the job Trump’s doing on the economy. A recent Wall Street Journal/NORC poll found that just 25% of Americans think they have a good chance of improving their standard of living, the lowest since that survey started asking the question in 1987.
People only have to look at their own lives and communities to see how poor the economy is — and if anything, the public hasn’t yet tuned in to just how bad things are going to get. Trump promised a manufacturing renaissance, but there are 78,000 fewer manufacturing jobs now than at the beginning of the year. His mass deportation effort will have a significant drag on the economy, leaving employers unable to fill positions in key sectors and depriving the country of both the production and the consumption those immigrants contributed. His tariffs are an outright catastrophe, ever-changing in ways that make it impossible for companies to plan, imposing higher costs on both consumers and businesses and producing retaliation from other countries that hurts American exporters.
If Trump had set out to intentionally sabotage the American economy, he couldn’t have done much worse. Elsewhere, the new administration’s evisceration of the federal government has added thousands to the unemployment rolls. Trump’s insane war on renewable energy not only undermines one of the most dynamic industries in the country, but it will most likely raise electricity prices for all of us. Millions of Americans will soon lose their health coverage because of the GOP budget. The White House’s devastation of universities and scientific and medical research will make America less competitive and dynamic. In short, if Trump had set out to intentionally sabotage the American economy, he couldn’t have done much worse. Electricity prices are a perfect example of the limitations of the reality-distortion field in which Trump attempts to envelop the country. He promised in 2024 that he’d cut electric bills in half within a year, but instead, prices are rising. There is no clever spin or blame-shifting that can convince most people their energy costs have gone down when their monthly bills are going up. Let’s recall how much invective was directed at Democrats during Joe Biden’s presidency every time one of them suggested that, in fact, the administration’s economic record was pretty good — which it was. Inflation spiked in most of the world in 2022, but in America it came down more quickly than in many other countries, helping us recover far more quickly from the pandemic-induced recession. Biden had the best job creation record of any presidential term in history. Yet whenever Democrats would defend the administration’s economic record, they would be denounced for allegedly dismissing people’s economic pain. Today, Trump and his aides are doing what Democrats were falsely accused of: brazenly lying to the public by insisting that the economy is terrific when it’s actually heading south. We know they won’t stop saying Trump is a genius and the economy has never been better. But if you want to know the truth, all you have to do is look around.
Paul Waldman is a journalist and author focused on politics and culture. 
