Sen. Elizabeth Warren helped get the week started with an interview on CNBC, which Donald Trump apparently watched. I can say that with some confidence because the president rage-tweeted his way through the on-air Q&A, accusing the Massachusetts Democrat of being “a LOSER” who “lies about everything.”
His online hysterics were unfortunate but predictable: The senator was telling the truth about the state of the U.S. economy, and for the Republican White House, the facts Warren presented were terribly inconvenient. Indeed, Trump has spent months insisting, ad nauseum, that the economy is “hot” and “booming,” thanks entirely to how awesome his awesomeness is.
Reality, however, keeps getting in the way. In recent days, we’ve learned that Americans are dealing with sluggish growth, stubborn inflation and a slumping manufacturing sector. U.S. factory orders are down, and consumer spending recently fell unexpectedly.
None of this is consistent with a “hot” or “booming” economy. On the contrary, it’s becoming increasingly easy to wonder about a possible recession.
Americans are also dealing with an anemic job market, the worst since the Great Recession (not including the totals from the pandemic in 2020). Indeed, I put together a new chart showing month-to-month changes to the job market since November 2020, when Trump lost his re-election bid to Joe Biden. The red columns show the months in which Trump was in the White House, while the blue columns reflect Biden’s term.
Hours after the latest job numbers reached the public, the president, in true authoritarian fashion, fired the head of the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics, who’d committed the grievous crime of releasing accurate information that the White House didn’t want to see. Two days later, the Republican told reporters, in reference to the economy, “We’re seeing phenomenal numbers. … I mean, really phenomenal numbers.”
This came as Trump characterized his own administration’s jobs data as “rigged,” “ridiculous,” “phony” and a “scam,” reality be damned.
The question I haven’t heard him answer is why, exactly, he came to this conclusion. This went largely unasked because the answer was so obvious: Trump had some baseless assumptions about what the numbers should’ve been, based on what he perceives as the greatness of his economic agenda. And since job growth continues to fall far short, common sense (or at least a Trumpified version of common sense) led him to conclude that officials in his own Labor Department must be conspiring against him. Indeed, over the weekend, as part of the larger gaslighting campaign, the president insisted online that he’s responsible for “creating the greatest economy, where prices and Inflation have come way down,” despite the economy being demonstrably and quantifiably worse than when he took office, and neither prices nor inflation have “come way down.” In other words, as Trump confronts facts he does not like, he’s left with a few choices. He can change direction and abandon a misguided agenda that is not working; he can ask the public to be patient while to tries a regressive and ineffectual experiment; or he can fire statisticians and brazenly lie to the public. Take a wild guess which path the Republican prefers.
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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