‘Turns out firing the ref doesn’t change the score’: Job growth slows to a 16-year low under Donald Trump

In an unexpected and frankly pretty terrible turn of events, the U.S. economy only added 22,000 new jobs in August, falling way short of the projected 75,000 that Trump wanted. This is a massive slowdown, especially when you consider that the unemployment rate also ticked up to 4.3%. The data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics just confirms what a lot of people have been feeling: the job market is weakening.

What makes this even worse is that it’s not just a one-month thing. Per CNBC, the Bureau of Labor Statistics also revised the job numbers for June and July, and they’re not pretty. The revisions show that a combined 21,000 fewer jobs were added in those months than was previously reported. The revision for June actually showed a loss of 13,000 jobs, making it the first negative month for job growth since December 2020.

This is a very significant sign of weakening, and it’s something that has a lot of people worried about the health of the economy. The last time someone gave numbers that told the truth about Trump’s bad effect on the economy, he fired them. However, the White House has been trying to put a positive spin on things, with Donald Trump recently boasting about “phenomenal numbers,” to lie to his supporters who don’t fact-check.

The job market is getting worse

The latest data just doesn’t back that up. When you look at the first eight months of this year, the economy has added about 598,000 jobs. That sounds okay until you compare it to previous years. For the first eight months of 2024, the total was over 1.1 million jobs, and in the same period in 2023, the number was over 1.8 million. The difference feels like night and day.

In fact, if you take out the anomaly that was 2020, when the pandemic messed everything up, the job growth for the first eight months of 2025 is the slowest the U.S. has seen since 2009. You know, back when the economy was still recovering from the Great Recession. It’s a pretty big deal.

This all comes on the heels of Trump firing the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics last month. Apparently, he was annoyed by the weak job data and, in a move that feels very on-brand, took his frustrations out on the person delivering the news. However, as MSNBC’s Ali Velshi said, “turns out firing the ref doesn’t change the score.”