President Donald Trump came into office with massive plans to overhaul the way the US government operates and consolidate power in himself.
And he’s been largely successful in implementing that vision, thanks to a cowed Congress, timid institutions and a languid judiciary.
But there are growing signs that his entire agenda could be undercut and his party could face massive political consequences because of his hubris on the single most important issue to Americans: the economy.
A new Bureau of Labor Statistics report Friday confirms some the worst fears about a worsening jobs market. A brief recap:
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Preliminary numbers show just 22,000 jobs added in August, a very low number for an economy that generally needs to create about 100,000 jobs every month to keep up with population growth.
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Revisions in other months mean the economy has created only an estimated 107,000 jobs over the last four months combined. Apart from recessions and their aftermaths, those are the worst numbers in decades.
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June’s jobs numbers were revised into negative territory (13,000 jobs lost), making it the first negative month since December 2020.
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Despite Trump’s promises of his tariffs revitalizing U.S. manufacturing boom, that industry has now lost 78,000 jobs this year.
The Trump administration has made pains to try to neutralize headlines about these jobs numbers, including last month by baselessly suggesting the numbers are being rigged to make them look bad. (There is no evidence for this, and there are safeguards to prevent such manipulation.) After a bad July jobs report, Trump fired the head of BLS and now aims to replace her with a controversial loyalist.
If Trump’s past is predicate, such conspiracy theories are likely to be revisited. But on Friday morning, there was apparently only so much the administration could do to spin these numbers.
Trump himself took aim at Jerome Powell, re-upping a familiar attack on the Fed Chair over his not lowering interest rates. Others acknowledged the report wasn’t what they were hoping for.
“This jobs number was certainly a little bit of a disappointment right now,” top White House economic adviser Kevin Hassett said on CNBC, while predicting some upward revisions.
Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer acknowledged on Fox Business that the new report “underperformed a bit,” while emphasizing that it at least contained some jobs gains (a very low bar, to be sure).
And Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick seemed to plead for patience, asking people to judge Trump’s jobs record not today but in 12 months.
“You look at the unemployment rate numbers today – wait until a year from today,” Lutnick said in CNBC. “Wow. It will be amazing numbers.”
But that’s asking a lot. People are already judging Trump’s stewardship of the economy more negatively than ever before. And while Trump arguably earned the benefit of the doubt when his tariffs didn’t lead to immediate and crushing consequences, he still faces a deeply skeptical public and potentially disastrous political consequences.
A Quinnipiac University poll in late August showed Trump with his worst economic approval numbers to date, in either of his two terms: 57% disapproving to 39% approving.
Gallup pegged his economic approval rating at just 37%, after averaging 52% in his first term. Just 29% of independents approved.
A Yahoo News-YouGov poll showed Americans disapproved of Trump on the “cost of living” by more than a 2-to-1 margin, 62-29%, and by a large margin on trade and tariffs, 58-35%.
We’re also seeing some real cracks even in Trump’s ever-loyal base. The Yahoo poll showed 27% of Republicans disapproved of Trump on the cost of living. And a Pew Research Center poll last month showed 32% of Republican-leaning voters disapproved of his tariffs strategy.
All of which suggests the patience of even Trump’s loyal supporters has already been tested. Are they really going to give him a year to straighten it all out?
The danger for Trump is that the economic picture turns bad enough that it sours Americans on the entire enterprise.
Trump’s power plays are largely built on acquiescence. People might not like his methods, but they don’t necessarily want to fight him on it. As long as these things don’t impact them directly, the backlash is limited.
Indeed, many of Trump’s most controversial initiatives are pretty unpopular – things like deporting people without due process, putting troops on US soil, the Department of Government Efficiency cuts, and Trump’s signature agenda bill that cut Medicaid. We’ve already seen cracks in Trump’s base on some of these issues – along with, most pronouncedly, the administration’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files.
But none of those issues has caused a real revolt by Congress or anyone who could impede his agenda.
The economy is perhaps the one thing that could change that rather quickly, and bring these readily apparent concerns about his presidency to the fore.
Should things continue to turn sour, Trump and Co. can blame BLS data and the Federal Reserve’s interest rates all they want. But it won’t be difficult for Americans to trace all of it to something that’s much easier to grasp and attach to Trump: his economy-rocking moves to unilaterally implement huge tariffs. These are moves that he made without consulting Congress, after all, and despite the (gently expressed) reservations of congressional Republicans who spent decades hailing free trade.
Trump did this despite persistent inflation that still hadn’t really abated. He voluntarily took ownership of an already-tenuous situation and injected it with a huge amount of uncertainty.
Trump invested gobs of political capital in this. It’s looking more and more like a bad bet.