Trump defends firing labor statistics chief by lying about her role in 2024 campaign – as it happened

This concludes our live coverage of the second Trump administration for the week. We will be back on Monday, once Donald Trump has concluded another long weekend of golfing. Here are the latest developments:

• US stocks slumped as Donald Trump unveiled new import tariffs on dozens of trading partners and a surprisingly weak jobs report spooked investors.

• Trump responded to new data showing that there were 258,000 fewer jobs created since May than previously estimated by firing the commissioner of the bureau of labor statistics, Erika McEntarfer. He then defended his decision by inventing an entirely false accusation that the fired economist had released false job numbers days before the 2024 election. The president repeated this lie several times.

• Bill Beach, a former Heritage foundation economist who was picked by Trump in 2018 to oversee labor statistics, denounced what he called the “totally groundless firing” of his successor.

• En route to his New Jersey golf club for the eighth time in six months, Trump cut off a reporter as soon as he said the words “Jeffrey Epstein” and moved away.

Those who have not seen it, and are interested in the questions surrounding the death in federal custody of Epstein, the late sex offender who socialized with Trump for more than a decade, should watch this CBS News visual analysis of the jailhouse video released by Trump’s justice department.

En route to another long weekend of golf on Friday, Donald Trump cut off a reporter as soon as he said the words “Jeffrey Epstein” and moved away from him.

The interaction was captured on video streamed by the White House on YouTube, as Trump took questions from reporters gathered outside to watch him depart by helicopter.

“Why did it take seven years, seven years”, the reporter began, “from the time that you learned that people were being stolen from Mar-a-Lago to the time that you kicked, that you took Jeffrey Epstein-”

“Yeah, I don’t understand your question,” Trump interjected as the reporter tried to finish asking it, saying “off the members”. The president by then had stepped away and called on a different reporter to ask him another question.

Although Trump has said on more than one occasion recently that he either could not hear or did not understand a question, he was surprisingly open to answering questions on his relationship with Epstein, the late sex offender, earlier in the week.

On a flight back to Washington on Tuesday, after a family trip to Scotland, where he opened a golf course that was to have been named for his late mother, but was instead dedicated to him, Trump even revealed, while standing next to two of his grandchildren, that Epstein “stole” a 16-year-old spa attendant, Virginia Roberts Giuffre, by hiring her away from Mar-Lago.

Court documents indicate that Giuffre was hired as Epstein’s personal masseuse by his former girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell at the Mar-a-Lago spa in the summer of 2000. Giuffre, who died this year, alleged in court documents that she was first abused by Epstein and Maxwell together that year, and then “lent out to other powerful men”, including Prince Andrew.

Trump maintained on Tuesday that he banned Epstein from the club soon after that, when he learned that he had hired away Giuffre and another club employee.

But Sarah Blaskey, a Miami Herald investigative reporter, pointed out in her 2020 book on Mar-a-Lago that Epstein remained on the membership rolls of Mar-a-Lago until October 2007, more than a year after he had been arrested and charged with unlawful sex with a minor.

It was apparently this discrepancy in Trump’s timeline that the president was unwilling to discuss on Friday.

Why are the federal government’s monthly job reports on US employment revised so often?

William Beach, a conservative economist who was Donald Trump’s hand-picked labor statistics commissioner during his first term, explained to CNN in January that the core problem, making initial estimates of job gains often inaccurate and subject to revision, is that the federal agency still relies on surveys, conducted in-person and over the phone, in an era when response rates have plummeted.

“With lower response rates, our estimates are going to be more volatile, and our benchmark revisions (which typically factor in hard data sources such as tax records) are going to be greater,” Beach told the broadcaster.

“With the larger revisions and the statistical system kind of on its heels, people are taking pot shots at the data,” Beach said days after Trumps’ second inaugural. “It’s very unfortunate that they’re doing it, and it’s being done left and right. It’s not a Republican or Democrat thing. It’s just politicians finding good targets.”

Despite Beach’s both-sides framing, there is no doubt that when it comes to suggest that the government labor data is manipulated for partisan reasons, Trump is the Truther-in-chief.

Trump has claimed this for years, frequently casting doubt on job numbers, and other economic data produced by the bureau of labor statistics, like inflation data and the Consumer Price Index (CPI).

Just last week, Trump repeated the claim he has made since returning to office, that prices on “groceries are down”. In fact, the CPI shows that prices are up 0.6% since January.

And when it comes to job reports, Trump insisted during the 2024 campaign that the Biden-Harris administration had been “caught fraudulently manipulating job statistics” when the bureau of labor statistics reported in August that new data showed that 818,000 fewer jobs had been created in the previous year than it had initially estimated.

“New Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that the Administration PADDED THE NUMBERS with an extra 818,000 Jobs that DO NOT EXIST, AND NEVER DID. The real Numbers are much worse than that,” Trump wrote on Truth Social the morning that revised data was released.

The obvious flaw in Trump’s logic then was that the initial estimates he called fake and the downward revision he cited as evidence of that fakery were both produced by the same people: the team of over 2,000 economists, researchers and data scientists led by Erika McEntarfer, the commissioner of labor statistics he fired on Friday for reporting another downward revision.

As the University of Michigan economist Justin Wolfers observed on Friday: “When preliminary payrolls numbers overestimated job growth under Biden – and were later revised down – Trumpland claimed this was the BLS trying to prop up the President. Today he interprets it as the BLS is trying to undermine him.”

Firing “the wonk in charge of the statisticians who track economic reality”, Wolfers added, “is an authoritarian four alarm fire. It will also backfire: you can’t bend economic reality, but you can break the trust of markets. And biased data yields worse policy.”

Speaking to reporters on Friday, Donald Trump defended his decision to fire Erika McEntarfer, the commissioner of labor statistics, and falsely accused her of having released reports just before the 2024 election that overstated the number of new jobs created by the Biden-Harris administration.

Asked by a reporter, “Why did you fire the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics?” Trump replied: “Because I think her numbers were wrong, just like I thought her numbers were wrong before the election.”

The president then went on to give a wildly inaccurate account of the jobs data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics in 2024.

“Days before the election, she came out with these beautiful numbers for Kamala, I guess Biden-Kamala, and she came out with these beautiful numbers trying to get somebody else elected,” Trump said, entirely misrepresenting the jobs report released on 1 November 2024, four days before the election, which in fact showed the US added just 12,000 jobs over the previous month.

At the time, the Trump campaign called the jobs report “a catastrophe” that “definitively reveals how badly Kamala Harris broke our economy”.

On Friday, however, the president offered a very different account of that report released just nine months ago.

“Then, right after the election,” Trump claimed, “she had an 8- or 900,000 dollar [sic] massive reduction, said she made a mistake.”

What Trump was misremembering is a Bureau of Labor Statistics announcement, on 21 August 2024, that updated data showed that there had been 818,000 fewer jobs added in the US in the previous year than it had initially estimated. That downward revision was large, but part of an annual process, in which the bureau updates its initial estimates when it gets better data.

The same day that revision was announced in 2024, Trump, who was then recalibrating his campaign to focus on Kamala Harris, posted on Truth Social that the Biden-Harris administration had been “caught fraudulently manipulating Job Statistics” and the “New Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that the Administration PADDED THE NUMBERS with an extra 818,000 Jobs that DO NOT EXIST, AND NEVER DID.”

On Friday, however, Trump repeatedly insisted that the August revision had not come until after the November election.

Before leaving for another long weekend of golf, Trump repeated his false claim about McEntarfer, the commissioner of labor statistics he just fired, to another reporter.

“Before the election,” Trump recalled, wrongly, “she gave out numbers that were so good for the Democrats, it was like unbelievable.”

“And then right after the election, she corrected those numbers with, I think, almost 900,000 correction,” he said, referring incorrectly to the revision that had taken place in August and had been a boon to his campaign.

“Well today she did the same thing, with the 253,000, whatever the number was,” Trump added, referring to McEntarfer’s last act of office: Friday’s announcement that the US economy added 258,000 fewer jobs in May and June than previously estimated.

Bill Beach, a former Heritage foundation economist who was picked by Donald Trump in 2018 to oversee labor statistics, denounced on Friday what he called the “totally groundless firing of Dr Erika McEntarfer, my successor as Commissioner of Labor Statistics at BLS”.

Beach added that Trump’s order to remove the bearer of bad news on jobs “sets a dangerous precedent and undermines the statistical mission of the Bureau”.

He also co-signed a statement with Erica Groshen, who served as the commissioner before him, from 2013 to 2017, which began:

Today, President Trump called into question the integrity of the Employment Situation report that the BLS released this morning. He accused BLS Commissioner Erika McEntarfer of deliberately reporting false numbers to reflect poorly on this administration. This baseless, damaging claim undermines the valuable work and dedication of BLS staff who produce the reports each month. This escalates the President’s unprecedented attacks on the independence and integrity of the federal statistical system.

The President seeks to blame someone for unwelcome economic news. The Commissioner does not determine what the numbers are but simply reports on what the data show. The process of obtaining the numbers is decentralized by design to avoid opportunities for interference. The BLS uses the same proven, transparent, reliable process to produce estimates every month. Every month, BLS revises the prior two months’ employment estimates to reflect slower-arriving, more-accurate information.

This rationale for firing Dr McEntarfer is without merit and undermines the credibility of federal economic statistics that are a cornerstone of intelligent economic decision-making by businesses, families, and policymakers. US official statistics are the gold standard globally. When leaders of other nations have politicized economic data, it has destroyed public trust in all official statistics and in government science.

Other experts and elected officials were equally scathing in their response to Trump’s move.

“This will make it difficult to trust government sources on economic and financial data,” Rohit Chopra, the former director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, wrote. “Many businesses and investors use these data sets to determine where they want to launch or grow, so this will have real costs.”

“Instead of helping people get good jobs, Donald Trump just fired the statistician who reported bad jobs data that the wanna-be king doesn’t like,” Elizabeth Warren, the Massachusetts senator and bankruptcy law expert, posted.

“No. Mr. President,” Bernie Sanders, the Vermont senator, wrote. “In America, you do not fire the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics for releasing a jobs report that you don’t like. That’s what authoritarians do. We need serious economists in these positions, not hacks who will only tell you what you want to hear.”

US stocks slumped on Friday, with the S&P on track for its biggest daily percentage decline in more than three months as Donald Trump unveiled new import tariffs on dozens of trading partners and a surprisingly weak jobs report spurred selling pressure.

Shares in Amazon also fell after the company failed to meet expectations for its Amazon Web Services cloud computing unit.

Just hours before Trump’s latest self-imposed tariff deadline on Friday, the president signed executive orders imposing import taxes on goods imported from around the globe, including key trading partners such as Canada, Brazil, India, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and the 27-nation European Union.

Investor confidence was also hit by new data showing that US job growth slowed more than expected in July, and was significantly lower than previously reported in May and June. Those job numbers prompted Trump to fire the messenger, commissioner of labor statistics Erika McEntarfer.

The jobs report significantly pushed up expectations that the Federal Reserve will cut interest rates at its next meeting in September.

According to preliminary data, the S&P 500 lost 101.60 points, or 1.60%, to end at 6,237.79 points, while the Nasdaq Composite fell 472.78 points, or 2.24%, to 20,649.67. The Dow Jones industrial average lost 543.97 points, or 1.23%, to close at 43,587.01.

• Donald Trump said he had ordered two nuclear submarines to be positioned in “appropriate regions” in response to “highly provocative statements” from former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev, who said yesterday that the US president should remember Moscow had Soviet-era nuclear strike capabilities. It comes amid a spiralling war of words with Medvedev as tensions rise over Trump’s efforts to get Russia to end its war in Ukraine or face economic sanctions. Medvedev had earlier said that Trump’s threats to sanction Russia and a recent ultimatum were “a threat and a step towards war”.

• Leaders of more than 60 countries were plunged into a fresh race to secure trade deals with the US after Trump unleashed global chaos with sweeping new tariff rates last night. Our story is here and a table of all the tariff rates for each country is here.

• Trump ordered the firing of the federal government official in charge of labor statistics, hours after data revealed jobs growth stalled this summer, prompting accusations that he is “firing the messenger”. In a Truth Social post, Trump claimed (with no evidence) that Erika McEntarfer had “faked” employment figures in the run-up to last year’s election, in a bid to boost Kamala Harris’s chances of victory, and implied she “manipulated” today’s numbers for political reasons. “We need accurate Jobs Numbers. I have directed my Team to fire this Biden Political Appointee, IMMEDIATELY. She will be replaced with someone much more competent and qualified,” Trump wrote.

• The Bureau of Labor Statistics released revised job stats today which showed the US economy added only 73,000 jobs in July, far lower than expected, amid ongoing concerns with Trump’s escalating trade war. In the report, the BLS also slashed the number of jobs added in May, revising the figure down by 125,000, from 144,000 to only 19,000, and in June, which was revised down by 133,000, from 147,000 to just 14,000 – a combined 258,000 fewer jobs than previously reported.

• Trump also said once again that Federal Reserve chair, Jerome Powell, should also be “put out to pasture”, as he continued to insist the US economy is booming on his watch and implore the Fed to lower interest rates. The Fed later announced that Federal Reserve governor Adriana Kugler will resign from the central bank’s board as of 8 August, leaving a key vacancy for Trump to fill ahead of schedule.

• Ghislaine Maxwell was “routinely moved” to a minimum-security federal prison camp in Texas, a senior administration official has told NBC News, due to safety concerns. “Any false assertion this individual was given preferential treatment is absurd. Prisoners are routinely moved in some instances due to significant safety and danger concerns,” the official said of Jeffrey Epstein’s accomplice, who is serving a 20-year sentence for sex trafficking and other crimes. She has appealed to the supreme court to overturn her conviction.

Continuing his attacks and baseless claims that the employment figures released today were “manipulated” for political reasons, Trump said the numbers were “rigged” to make him and his party look bad.

He wrote on Truth Social:

In my opinion, today’s Jobs Numbers were RIGGED in order to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad – Just like when they had three great days around the 2024 Presidential Election, and then, those numbers were ‘taken away’ on November 15, 2024, right after the Election, when the Jobs Numbers were massively revised DOWNWARD, making a correction of over 818,000 Jobs — A TOTAL SCAM. Jerome ‘Too Late’ Powell is no better! But, the good news is, our Country is doing GREAT!

The Federal Reserve has announced that Adriana D Kugler will step down early from her position as governor of the Federal Reserve Board on 8 August.

Her term was due to expire in January, but her early resignation gives Donald Trump an opportunity to more quickly appoint someone who could eventually replace Jerome Powell as chair.

In a speech earlier this month, the New York Times notes that Kugler said the Fed should not cut interest rates “for some time” as tariffs trickle through to consumer prices.

Responding to Ghislaine Maxwell’s move to a minimum-security federal prison camp in Texas, a senior administration official has told NBC News that prisoners are “routinely moved” due to safety concerns.

“Any false assertion this individual was given preferential treatment is absurd. Prisoners are routinely moved in some instances due to significant safety and danger concerns,” the official said of Jeffrey Epstein’s accomplice.

In a statement earlier today responding to Maxwell’s move from a Florida facility to the one in Texas, the family of Virginia Giuffre, along with Maxwell and Epstein accusers Annie and Maria Farmer, said:

It is with horror and outrage that we object to the preferential treatment convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell has received.