The latest jobs report is coming out on Friday, but President Donald Trump can’t promise that the numbers will be credible.
The president evaded a question over the credibility of the upcoming jobs report following the messy aftermath of the July release, when he fired then-Bureau of Labor Statistics chief Erika McEntarfer because he was unhappy with the numbers.
During a dinner with bigshot business leaders at the White House on Thursday, Trump was asked whether he would commit to saying that the data in the Friday jobs report would be credible.
“We’re gonna have to see what the number— I don’t know, they come out tomorrow,” he began.
Trump proceeded to suggest that “the real numbers” will come out “in a year from now,” when the tech companies run by the executives seated in front of him—including Apple, Meta, and OpenAI—”start opening up.”
The private dinner hosted by Trump and First Lady Melania was attended by tech bros Tim Cook of Apple, Mark Zuckerberg of Meta, Sam Altman of OpenAI, Bill Gates of Microsoft, and Sergey Brin of Google, among a long list of others.
“When these monstrous, huge, beautiful places—they’re palaces of genius—when they start opening up, I think you’ll see job numbers that are going to be absolutely incredible,” Trump said. “Right now, it’s a lot of construction numbers, but you’re going to see job numbers like our country has never seen before.”
Trump kicked McEntarfer out of the BLS after the July report revealed a slowdown in job growth and a rise in unemployment. The disappointing July numbers were coupled with massive revisions to the June and May reports, which went down by a combined 258,000 jobs from earlier announced levels.
McEntarfer, a Biden appointee, was confirmed in a bipartisan vote in 2024.
Trump claimed without providing evidence that McEntarfer “faked” the jobs numbers.
“Important numbers like this must be fair and accurate; they can’t be manipulated for political purposes,” he wrote in a Truth Social rant at the time.
Trump’s nominee to the top job at the BLS was E.J. Antoni, the chief economist at the ultraconservative Heritage Foundation that produced the controversial policy playbook Project 2025. He is still awaiting Senate confirmation.
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