If Trump thought he could neuter the Jeffrey Epstein scandal this week, he received an even worse present on the doorstep of the White House on Friday: a weak jobs report.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported a triple barrel of bad news in its jobs report: First, it showed that the unemployment rate ticked up to 4.3 percent. Second, the number showed that the U.S. economy added only 22,000 jobs, far below market expectations. Third, downward revisions from the June jobs report showed that for the first time since 2020, the U.S. economy had lost jobs, in this case losing 13,000 jobs.
Of course, Trump tried to stem the tide on this. After last months anemic jobs report that the economy added only 73,000 jobs in July, he fired BLS Commissioner Erika McEntarfer. He nominated E.J. Antoni – the chief economist at the Heritage Foundation, which crafted Project 2025 – to replace her.
But nothing can stave off the havoc that Trump’s tariffs will wreak on the economy. A look under the hood of the numbers today shows the economy is headed to a full-fledged heart attack.
First, the major sectors that Trump has pledged he will lift up took a beating. Despite the fact that Trump prioritized oil, gas and coal in his administration, the mining, quarrying, and oil and gas extraction industries lost 6,000 jobs.
A poor jobs report shows President Donald Trump faces a potential recession (Getty Images)
Trump and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick have said that Trump’s “Liberation Day” reciprocal tariffs will cause a revitalization of American labor and manufacturing. Lutnick even talked about “the army of millions and millions of human beings screwing in little screws to make iPhones” coming to the United States.
That has not happened. Quite the opposite: manufacturing lost 12,000 jobs last month and has declined by 78,000 jobs in the past year, a brutal development.
And the economy is bleeding with many of the demographics that helped Trump win in 2024. In August of last year, Black men had a seasonally adjusted unemployment rate of 5.9 percent. That number jumped to 7.1 percent.
The same goes for Hispanic men, who broke majorly for Trump in the 2024 election. Hispanic men 20 years and older saw their seasonally adjusted unemployment rate go from 4.0 percent in January to 4.8 percent in August.
Both Black and Hispanic men have been more open to voting for Trump because they believed in his record as a businessman and in his business acumen. But as both groups continue to take a hit because of Trump’s tariffs, both in terms of paying more and losing their jobs, they might sour on the Republican Party.
And expect more pain to come. So far, jobs reports have not shown the extent of cuts by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency because many of the workers have received paid leave or severance. But much of that severance pay will run out in the coming months, so the full of extent of the DOGE cuts will finally be seen.
Last month, most of Trump’s tariffs went into effect with the exception of another extension for China. But now that Trump seems to not take the “Trump Always Chickens Out” – aka TACO – business will either have to eat most of the tariffs, and therefore hire less, place the cost of the tariffs on consumers or a mix of both.
There are signs some Americans are having enough. An Economist/YouGov poll showed 53 percent of Americans disapprove of Trump’s performance on the economy. The disapproval is even higher on inflation, where 62 percent of Americans disapprove of his job performance.
Trump has mostly skated by on the vapor trails of the economy that Biden had, which had low unemployment and wage growth to mollify the pinch of higher gas and grocery prices. And even then, most voters hated it enough to vote for Trump again. Now he’s facing the same troubles, except they are all self-inflicted. And he won’t be able to blame Joe Biden.