Conservative Host Grills Trump on Terrible Jobs Report Excuse
Donald Trump faced an uncomfortable interview on his weak economy.

President Trump faced a surprisingly tough interview on CNBC’s Squawk Box Tuesday morning, as host Joe Kernen, who has often praised the president in the past, grilled him on his ousting of the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics over his claims that the job numbers were “rigged.”
Trump fired accused the former commissioner, Erika McEntarfer, last week after accusing her of propping up former President Biden and attempting to undermine himself. The firing came after an abysmal July job report, leading many to the reasonable conclusion that Trump is shooting the messenger while wrecking the economy, and now plans to install a lackey to replace McEntarfer.
On Squawk Box, Kernen noted that Elaine Chao, a former Trump transportation secretary and Bush II labor secretary, had said there’s no way that McEntarfer could have rigged the numbers.
“She said the commissioner doesn’t even really get involved with the actual minutiae of putting all these things together and there’s no way she could have chosen to rig these numbers to make ’em look bad,” Kernen said. “It’s just a big leap to go to rigged—and also it makes, Mr. President, it makes anyone you pick—critics are going to say, ‘Hey, he’s picking a guy or gal that’s giving him the numbers he wants.’ So it undermines confidence in the system to some extent.”
Trump replied: “I think when somebody says the commissioner is not involved, I don’t want to get into any arguments with anybody—why should I? She’s a very nice woman. But when they say that nobody is involved, that it wasn’t political—give me a break.”
KERNEN: It's a big leap to go to 'rigged' with the jobs reports. And it undermines confidence in the system.
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 5, 2025
TRUMP: Give me a break pic.twitter.com/rcdOWElFBs
Earlier in the interview, Kernen also fact-checked Trump on his claims that the BLS put out fake jobs numbers to help Kamala Harris in the 2024 election.
“And so they gave phony numbers in order to win the election,” Trump said. “After I won the election—I said, ‘Too big to rig’—but, after I won the election, then they announced a downward number. In other words, to bring them back to reality. And I said, ‘Wow, supposing I would have lost, I would have blamed that and people would have said I was a conspiracy theorist.’”
In reality, that narrative is completely backward. The November BLS jobs report, released just days before the 2024 election, showed “weak growth” of 12,000 jobs for the month prior, as well as downward revisions for September and August. (Trump’s campaign even seized on this with a statement that said it showed “how badly Kamala Harris broke our economy.”) However, a month after the election, the October figure was revised upward.
And, as Kernen pointed out, Trump’s claim of a downward revision of “almost 900,000” (actually 818,000) came months prior to the election, in August 2024. (Trump, at the time, baselessly hailed this routine revision as evidence of Biden and Kamala Harris “fraudulently manipulating job statistics.”)