"Team Trump struggles to spin the worst job numbers since the Great Recession"

[Miles Archer]

Team Trump struggles to spin the worst job numbers since the Great Recession

In mid-February, as Donald Trump’s State of the Union address neared, Peter Navarro, a leading White House voice on trade and economic policy, told Fox News that the U.S. economy was “perfect.” A week later, during JD Vance’s latest Fox News appearance, the vice president celebrated the “Trump boom” in the economy.

Soon after, the American public learned that economic growth during the first year of the president’s second term reached a nine-year low (excluding the pandemic). Late last week, the latest job numbers were even worse: The U.S. economy lost 90,000 jobs in February, and the unemployment rate inched higher.

Indeed, the closer one looked at the data, the worse the figures appeared. Trump has been in the White House for 14 months, and during that time the cumulative total is 150,000 jobs. In the last 14 months of Joe Biden’s presidency, by contrast, the American economy added 1.74 million jobs.

As economist Heather Long noted, the Republican president launched his “Liberation Day” tariffs in April 2025, and if we combine all of the jobs lost and gained between May 2025 and February 2026, there’s actually been a net loss in American jobs.

So much for the “Trump boom.”

https://www.ms.now/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/team-trump-struggles-to-spin-on-the-worst-job-numbers-since-the-great-recession