Trump defends firing labor statistics chief by lying about her role in 2024 campaign – as it happened

Trump offers wildly false claim about job numbers released before 2024 election to defend firing of labor statistics chief

Speaking to reporters on Friday, Donald Trump defended his decision to fire Erika McEntarfer, the commissioner of labor statistics, and falsely accused her of having released reports just before the 2024 election that overstated the number of new jobs created by the Biden-Harris administration.

Asked by a reporter, “Why did you fire the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics?” Trump replied: “Because I think her numbers were wrong, just like I thought her numbers were wrong before the election.”

The president then went on to give a wildly inaccurate account of the jobs data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics in 2024.

On Friday, Donald Trump gave reporters a wildly inaccurate account of when the bureau of labor statistics revised job numbers in 2024.

“Days before the election, she came out with these beautiful numbers for Kamala, I guess Biden-Kamala, and she came out with these beautiful numbers trying to get somebody else elected,” Trump said, entirely misrepresenting the jobs report released on 1 November 2024, four days before the election, which in fact showed the US added just 12,000 jobs over the previous month.

At the time, the Trump campaign called the jobs report “a catastrophe” that “definitively reveals how badly Kamala Harris broke our economy”.

On Friday, however, the president offered a very different account of that report released just nine months ago.

“Then, right after the election,” Trump claimed, “she had an 8- or 900,000 dollar [sic] massive reduction, said she made a mistake.”

What Trump was misremembering is a Bureau of Labor Statistics announcement, on 21 August 2024, that updated data showed that there had been 818,000 fewer jobs added in the US in the previous year than it had initially estimated. That downward revision was large, but part of an annual process, in which the bureau updates its initial estimates when it gets better data.

The same day that revision was announced in 2024, Trump, who was then recalibrating his campaign to focus on Kamala Harris, posted on Truth Social that the Biden-Harris administration had been “caught fraudulently manipulating Job Statistics” and the “New Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that the Administration PADDED THE NUMBERS with an extra 818,000 Jobs that DO NOT EXIST, AND NEVER DID.”

On Friday, however, Trump repeatedly insisted that the August revision had not come until after the November election.

Before leaving for another long weekend of golf, Trump repeated his false claim about McEntarfer, the commissioner of labor statistics he just fired, to another reporter.

“Before the election,” Trump recalled, wrongly, “she gave out numbers that were so good for the Democrats, it was like unbelievable.”

“And then right after the election, she corrected those numbers with, I think, almost 900,000 correction,” he said, referring incorrectly to the revision that had taken place in August and had been a boon to his campaign.

“Well today she did the same thing, with the 253,000, whatever the number was,” Trump added, referring to McEntarfer’s last act of office: Friday’s announcement that the US economy added 258,000 fewer jobs in May and June than previously estimated.

Key events

Closing summary

This concludes our live coverage of the second Trump administration for the week. We will be back on Monday, once Donald Trump has concluded another long weekend of golfing. Here are the latest developments:

US stocks slumped as Donald Trump unveiled new import tariffs on dozens of trading partners and a surprisingly weak jobs report spooked investors.
Trump responded to new data showing that there were 258,000 fewer jobs created since May than previously estimated by firing the commissioner of the bureau of labor statistics, Erika McEntarfer. He then defended his decision by inventing an entirely false accusation that the fired economist had released false job numbers days before the 2024 election. The president repeated this lie several times.
Bill Beach, a former Heritage foundation economist who was picked by Trump in 2018 to oversee labor statistics, denounced what he called the “totally groundless firing” of his successor.
En route to his New Jersey golf club for the eighth time in six months, Trump cut off a reporter as soon as he said the words “Jeffrey Epstein” and moved away.

Those who have not seen it, and are interested in the questions surrounding the death in federal custody of Epstein, the late sex offender who socialized with Trump for more than a decade, should watch this CBS News visual analysis of the jailhouse video released by Trump’s justice department.

A CBS News visual analysis of video released by the justice department from the night of Jeffrey Epstein’s death in custody.

Asked why he took so long to bar Jeffrey Epstein from Mar-a-Lago, Trump cuts off reporter and moves away

En route to another long weekend of golf on Friday, Donald Trump cut off a reporter as soon as he said the words “Jeffrey Epstein” and moved away from him.

The interaction was captured on video streamed by the White House on YouTube, as Trump took questions from reporters gathered outside to watch him depart by helicopter.

“Why did it take seven years, seven years”, the reporter began, “from the time that you learned that people were being stolen from Mar-a-Lago to the time that you kicked, that you took Jeffrey Epstein-”

“Yeah, I don’t understand your question,” Trump interjected as the reporter tried to finish asking it, saying “off the members”. The president by then had stepped away and called on a different reporter to ask him another question.

Although Trump has said on more than one occasion recently that he either could not hear or did not understand a question, he was surprisingly open to answering questions on his relationship with Epstein, the late sex offender, earlier in the week.

On a flight back to Washington on Tuesday, after a family trip to Scotland, where he opened a golf course that was to have been named for his late mother, but was instead dedicated to him, Trump even revealed, while standing next to two of his grandchildren, that Epstein “stole” a 16-year-old spa attendant, Virginia Roberts Giuffre, by hiring her away from Mar-Lago.

Court documents indicate that Giuffre was hired as Epstein’s personal masseuse by his former girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell at the Mar-a-Lago spa in the summer of 2000. Giuffre, who died this year, alleged in court documents that she was first abused by Epstein and Maxwell together that year, and then “lent out to other powerful men”, including Prince Andrew.

Trump maintained on Tuesday that he banned Epstein from the club soon after that, when he learned that he had hired away Giuffre and another club employee.

But Sarah Blaskey, a Miami Herald investigative reporter, pointed out in her 2020 book on Mar-a-Lago that Epstein remained on the membership rolls of Mar-a-Lago until October 2007, more than a year after he had been arrested and charged with unlawful sex with a minor.

It was apparently this discrepancy in Trump’s timeline that the president was unwilling to discuss on Friday.

Donald Trump spoke to reporters about Jeffrey Epstein on Tuesday on Air Force One while standing next to two of his grandchildren. Photograph: Jacquelyn Martin/AP

Why are job reports revised so often? Survey says: Americans don’t like surveys.

Why are the federal government’s monthly job reports on US employment revised so often?

William Beach, a conservative economist who was Donald Trump’s hand-picked labor statistics commissioner during his first term, explained to CNN in January that the core problem, making initial estimates of job gains often inaccurate and subject to revision, is that the federal agency still relies on surveys, conducted in-person and over the phone, in an era when response rates have plummeted.

“With lower response rates, our estimates are going to be more volatile, and our benchmark revisions (which typically factor in hard data sources such as tax records) are going to be greater,” Beach told the broadcaster.

“With the larger revisions and the statistical system kind of on its heels, people are taking pot shots at the data,” Beach said days after Trumps’ second inaugural. “It’s very unfortunate that they’re doing it, and it’s being done left and right. It’s not a Republican or Democrat thing. It’s just politicians finding good targets.”

Despite Beach’s both-sides framing, there is no doubt that when it comes to suggest that the government labor data is manipulated for partisan reasons, Trump is the Truther-in-chief.

Trump has claimed this for years, frequently casting doubt on job numbers, and other economic data produced by the bureau of labor statistics, like inflation data and the Consumer Price Index (CPI).

Just last week, Trump repeated the claim he has made since returning to office, that prices on “groceries are down”. In fact, the CPI shows that prices are up 0.6% since January.

And when it comes to job reports, Trump insisted during the 2024 campaign that the Biden-Harris administration had been “caught fraudulently manipulating job statistics” when the bureau of labor statistics reported in August that new data showed that 818,000 fewer jobs had been created in the previous year than it had initially estimated.

“New Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that the Administration PADDED THE NUMBERS with an extra 818,000 Jobs that DO NOT EXIST, AND NEVER DID. The real Numbers are much worse than that,” Trump wrote on Truth Social the morning that revised data was released.

The obvious flaw in Trump’s logic then was that the initial estimates he called fake and the downward revision he cited as evidence of that fakery were both produced by the same people: the team of over 2,000 economists, researchers and data scientists led by Erika McEntarfer, the commissioner of labor statistics he fired on Friday for reporting another downward revision.

As the University of Michigan economist Justin Wolfers observed on Friday: “When preliminary payrolls numbers overestimated job growth under Biden – and were later revised down – Trumpland claimed this was the BLS trying to prop up the President. Today he interprets it as the BLS is trying to undermine him.”

Firing “the wonk in charge of the statisticians who track economic reality”, Wolfers added, “is an authoritarian four alarm fire. It will also backfire: you can’t bend economic reality, but you can break the trust of markets. And biased data yields worse policy.”