The jobs market is at a total standstill thanks to President Donald Trump, with the Bureau of Labor Statistics announcing on Friday that in June, the economy actually lost 13,000 jobs. It’s the first time the monthly jobs report went negative since December 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Indeed, over the last decade, monthly job growth has been negative only four times—with all of those times during a Trump tenure. The jobs market crashed in March and April of 2020, when the world shuttered to stop the spread of COVID-19. The economy also lost jobs in December 2020, when the COVID-19 virus.
But June’s jobs losses were almost certainly thanks to Trump’s idiotic tariff policywhich has made the cost of doing business exponentially higher for companies.
Trump and his administration have bragged about the billions the tariffs have put into the Treasury Department’s coffers. But that has come at the expense of American workers—who now are having a much harder time finding a job with companies either freezing hiring or conducting layoffs to account for the tariff hit to their business.
Indeed, since April, when Trump announced his moronic tariff policy, the economy has added an average of just 53,000 jobs per month per the BLS findings—a dismal number that’s far below the 168,000 monthly average in 2024 when Joe Biden was in office.
The BLS report also included August’s jobs numbers, which showed the economy added a measly 22,000 jobs—far below the 76,000 jobs economists had expected. The unemployment rate is also now 4.3%, the highest it’s been since October 2021.
“The August jobs report shows the job market is going from frozen to cracking,” Heather Long, chief economist at the Navy Federal Credit Union, wrote in a post on X.
Trump is likely to be furious by the August BLS report. Last month, when the July jobs report showed that virtually no jobs were added over the previous three monthsTrump fired the BLS director and announced he was replacing her with a right-wing crank who wants to do away with monthly jobs reports altogether.
Given that this jobs report is even worse than July’s, it’s unclear how Trump will react. As of press time, he has not commented, save for posting a bizarre screed about Jeffrey Epstein.
But Trump’s Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who has helped implement Trump’s trade policy that is killing the economy, made a comment on CNBC that suggested future data won’t be trustworthy.
“I think they’ll get better because you’ll take out the people who are just trying to create noise against the president,” Lutnick saidan ominous comment as it suggests future BLS numbers could be cooked to make Trump look better.
Lutnick added, “This is gonna be the greatest growth economy six months from now, a year from today.
Sure, and I’m going to win the lottery.
