President Donald Trump applies a very simple – and deeply dishonest – approach to telling the story of America’s economy: Everything his opponents do is designed to destroy it, and only he can fix it.
And if the economic data doesn’t support Trump’s claims, he plays the victim of a rigged system. This way, in his own telling, Trump can never be wrong. Either his policies saved the day, or his rivals cheated him out of victory.
No surprise there. This is Trump’s schtick for everything, from developing real estate to keeping score at golf to winning and losing presidential elections.
We’re about seven months into Trump’s second term, and the data produced by his chaotic economic policies – trade wars and tariffs for our allies, mass deportations that impact agriculture and other industries, overhaul of agencies that has eliminated nearly 150,000 federal employees – tells a story Trump doesn’t want you to hear.
Trump and Republicans still owe us an economic resurgence
President Donald Trump answers questions from reporters as he tours the roof of the West Wing of the White House on Aug. 5, 2025.
Prices are rising, growth is slowing and unemployment for some Americans is increasing. The stock market is noticing.
Trump’s conniption about adjusted Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) job numbers from May, June and July continued with an attempt to distort reality during an Aug. 5 CNBC interview, where a friendly interviewer couldn’t shake him from his baseless claim that the report was “rigged.”
This is instructive because it shows us what he fears.
Our economy displayed some strengths and plenty of challenges in 2024 when Joe Biden was president and Vice President Kamala Harris lost the presidential election to Trump, who directly linked economic revival through tariffs and trade wars with the deportation of undocumented immigrants.
We’ve now seen nationwide deportation efforts so random and ruthless that public sentiment has turned on Trump for this issue. But where is the economic revival that he promised?
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There, too, on the economy, Trump’s approval ratings are dismal. He’s tanking. And he needs someone to blame.
So he fired BLS Commissioner Erika McEntarfer on Aug. 1 and continued this week to claim, while offering zero evidence, that she had somehow rigged the reports that showed America adding a lackluster 73,000 jobs in July while revising downward the projections for May and June by 258,000 jobs.
Trump had previously touted the May and June reports as proof that he was “revitalizing the American economy.” The revised data bursts those boasts.
No wonder he wigged out. He must know that he now faces what he warned about while campaigning for reelection.
The truth of the economy is plain to see
Street signs hang outside the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) on Wall Street in New York City in 2025.
Trump, campaigning in Wisconsin in May 2024, claimed Biden’s administration was suffering from “stagflation” – a period of increasing inflation, slowing economic growth and high unemployment.
America hasn’t actually seen stagflation since Jimmy Carter’s presidency.
But Trump told his supporters in Wisconsin that stagflation “spells the death of the American dream,” while directly linking his false claim to his complaints about undocumented immigrants.
Now that he is in charge, talk of stagflation is back in a way that Trump doesn’t want to hear.
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Prices in June ticked up 2.6% from 12 months before, when Biden was president. The Associated Press says it’s a sign that “broad-based tariffs are starting to lift prices for many goods.”
Unemployment is climbing among Black Americans, rising from 6.3% in July 2024 to 7.2% this July, an economic indicator that can be an early sign of a weakening job market.
A new report showed the nation’s gross domestic product, a broad measure of the nation’s economy, grew by less than 1.3% in the first half of 2025, down from 2.8% growth a year ago.
While the GDP is still growing, Trump’s unpredictable dalliances with tariffs affected the percentage.
The stock market, which has been on a Trump tariff roller coaster ride for months, clearly took note on Aug. 5 of rising prices and falling employment, giving back some recent gains.
Americans keep disapproving of Trump’s policies
None of this means America’s economy is on the precipice. It just means the economic revival Trump promised on the campaign trail is not happening. If anything, his policies are making things worse, not better.
But that’s not a story Trump could ever tell. Instead, he’ll try to construct an alternate reality where he is winning at everything while foes, real and imagined, attempt to defeat him.
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Just listen to Trump ramble on CNBC, where he tried to float the whopper that he has “the best poll numbers I’ve ever had.” It was just too much, so the host had to tell him he was wrong. His response: “fake polls.”
The truth: 54.8% of Americans disapprove of Trump’s handling of the economy while 41.9% approve, as of Aug. 4, according to an average of surveys compiled by the website RealClear Polling.
But Trump would much rather fire statisticians for producing accurate reports than admit that his promise of economic revival has been stymied by his own actions. That’s not going to fix anything. The most likely outcome is that future reports will echo Trump’s lies to prevent his tantrums.
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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: New jobs report isn’t the only sign of Trump’s bad economy | Opinion
