{"id":118532,"date":"2025-08-04T15:50:21","date_gmt":"2025-08-04T15:50:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/118532\/"},"modified":"2025-08-04T15:50:21","modified_gmt":"2025-08-04T15:50:21","slug":"trump-tries-to-spin-purge-his-way-to-declaring-economic-victory","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/118532\/","title":{"rendered":"Trump Tries to Spin, Purge His Way to Declaring Economic Victory"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tLate last week, Donald Trump<\/a> realized a dream that he\u2019s had since he was president of the United States the first time: firing the person who<\/a> informed the world that his economy<\/a> isn\u2019t as great as he wants to pretend it is.<\/p>\n

\n\tIt was a move so comically autocratic that Recep Erdogan of Turkey already did it in 2022<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\n\tAccording to former senior Trump administration officials, during his first term in office, the president would repeatedly complain to his aides that he should just fire the government officials who contradicted him by publicly promoting facts and data that were politically inconvenient to him. He was frequently paranoid about federal bureaucrats and other personnel trying to make him look bad. Things only got worse as the 2020 presidential election neared, when he and his White House embarked on frenzied cover-ups and propaganda campaigns, such as pressuring the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to dial down the ballooning Covid-19 body count<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tIn the opening months of his second presidency, Trump still has a ton to cover up or to try to talk his way out of \u2014 and he\u2019s surrounded by a team of overzealous sycophants who want to assist him in propping up his authoritarian fantasies in ways that some of his first-term appointees squeamishly, if only occasionally, resisted.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn poll<\/a> after poll in recent months, the American public has been screaming at the Trump administration that his policies have not improved, or have actually hurt, their day-to-day lives. The key issue that put Trump back in the White House<\/a> \u2014 a brutal economy reflecting the aftershocks of the coronavirus pandemic, an end to aid programs, and the increasingly punishing state of American capitalism \u2014 is still putting many millions of Americans through hell. That economy now belongs to the sitting president, who keeps throttling it with his chaos-driven tariff regime. And the voters have noticed.<\/p>\n

\n\tAccording to a new survey from University of Massachusetts Amherst, Trump\u2019s poll numbers have fallen through the floor. The survey puts his approval rating at 38 percent, with 58 percent disapproving. Less than two thirds of respondents said Trump has handled inflation or tariffs<\/a> well; 37 percent of people said he\u2019s handled jobs well, though that was before a weak jobs report. Trump\u2019s numbers with independents are exceptionally poor: 21 percent approval, with 17 percent saying he\u2019s handling inflation well.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\t\tEditor\u2019s picks<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cWith inflation remaining a persistent problem, a weakening job market, and tariffs causing economic upheaval in the stock market and corporate boardrooms, it is no surprise that majorities of Americans believe that President Trump has done a poor job in handling inflation, jobs, and tariffs since taking office for a second time,\u201d says UMass Poll Director Tatishe Nteta. He adds that \u201ctime will tell whether his efforts to pass the buck will alter the public\u2019s perceptions of Trump\u2019s economic performance or if Americans will continue to believe that the buck stops with President Trump.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tBut in the same way that this president figured he could bomb and shit-post his way to peace<\/a> in the Middle East, Trump still thinks that he can spin the media and purge his government all the way to declaring economic victory, no matter what the economic data and Americans say.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tOn Friday, the Bureau of Labor<\/a> Statistics reported that the job market is stagnating<\/a>, showing weak numbers for July as it revised down previous job growth estimates for May and June.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tAsked on Friday to comment, albeit anonymously, on the just-released jobs report, one senior Trump administration official simply replied to Rolling Stone: \u201cShitty.\u201d They declined to elaborate further.<\/p>\n

\t\tRelated Content<\/p>\n

\n\tTo several of the president\u2019s advisers, the problem with the jobs report was that it showed the economy is not exactly \u201cHOT,\u201d as Trump often claims to the American people. Trump saw it differently. He lashed out, claiming that \u201ctoday\u2019s Jobs Numbers were RIGGED in order to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad,\u201d and publicly announced the firing of Erika McEntarfer<\/a>, the Commissioner of Labor Statistics.<\/p>\n

\n\tPrior to the president\u2019s outburst online, Vice President, J.D. Vance was citing<\/a> the BLS data as evidence of Trump\u2019s economic splendor.<\/p>\n

\n\tBy that point, Trump administration officials and communications hands across the federal government had been working on press releases and talking points for their principals to try to spin the latest jobs report data to make it sound like things are still on the right track \u2014 and that Trumponomics is working.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tAs soon as Trump posted his social-media rant announcing the sacking of the BLS official, those drafts were immediately junked, or at least seriously revised to incorporate the president\u2019s baseless \u201crigged\u201d claims, two administration appointees say.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn the hours before Trump announced McEntarfer\u2019s firing, Stephen Moore, an informal economic adviser to Trump, was blunt, telling Rolling Stone that when it came to \u201cthe lousy jobs numbers, a lot of that are residual effects of the tariffs. Everybody was very uncertain about how this was all headed, and those tariffs caused a lot of havoc.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tMoore says that while he\u2019s \u201cstill pretty bullish going forward\u201d due to the president and the GOP getting \u201cthe tax bill done\u201d and the recent \u201cseries of trade deals,\u201d the Trump ally says that \u201cI think now would be a good time to stop talking about new tariffs.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cSometimes Trump can\u2019t stand prosperity,\u201d he adds. \u201cWhenever things start to go really well like with the stock market, he announces another round of tariffs like he did yesterday\u2026 My advice to Trump is to stop with the tariffs. We don\u2019t need tariffs right now\u2026 When I see him, he knows my position; every time he sees me, he says: \u2018There\u2019s Steve Moore! He doesn\u2019t like tariffs!\u2019 This will hopefully get the administration to back off of the tariffs.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tBut if this past week is any indication, Trump isn\u2019t done causing economic chaos. Instead, Trump and his government are going to prioritize suppressing bad news and uncomfortable economic data.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cBLS Has Lengthy History of Inaccuracies, Incompetence,\u201d the Trump White House insisted on Friday evening, in an email blast to the media. \u201cA lengthy history of inaccuracies and incompetence by Erika McEntarfer, the former Biden-appointed Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, has completely eroded public trust in the government agency charged with disseminating key data used by policymakers and businesses to make consequential decisions.\u201d<\/p>\n

\t\tTrending Stories<\/p>\n

\n\tAs Trump was leaving the White House Friday evening, a reporter asked the president why anyone should trust his administration\u2019s monthly jobs reports going forward.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cYou\u2019re right,\u201d Trump said<\/a>. \u201cWhy should anybody trust numbers?\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Late last week, Donald Trump realized a dream that he\u2019s had since he was president of the United…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":118533,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[64,7823,69,79,73367,606,4154,2175,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-118532","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-business","8":"tag-business","9":"tag-covid","10":"tag-donald-trump","11":"tag-economy","12":"tag-erika-mcentarfer","13":"tag-labor","14":"tag-poll","15":"tag-tariffs","16":"tag-united-states","17":"tag-unitedstates","18":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/114971294241879845","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/118532","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=118532"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/118532\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/118533"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=118532"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=118532"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=118532"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}