Layoffs Surge to Nearly 20-Year High as Job Openings Plummet

Donald Trump’s economy has led to the worst January in job cuts since the Great Recession in 2009.

U.S.-based employers laid off 108,435 employees last month, three times as many as in December and twice as many as January 2025, according to a monthly report from Challenger, Gray & Christmas, a firm that helps executives transition to new jobs. The country hasn’t had a January this bad in seven years, the report said.

Two companies are responsible for 40 percent of these job losses: Amazon, which cut 16,000 jobs, and UPS, which cut 30,000 jobs. The cuts are even related: UPS’s cuts are connected to how it is winding down a delivery agreement with Amazon.

The most layoffs were seen in five industries: transportation, technology, health care, chemical manufacturing, and financial.

“Generally, we see a high number of job cuts in the first quarter, but this is a high total for January,” said Andy Challenger, the firm’s chief revenue officer, in a statement. “It means most of these plans were set at the end of 2025, signaling employers are less than optimistic about the outlook for 2026.”

The report attributes 30,784 of the job losses to ending contracts, such as that of UPS. Market and economic conditions led to 28,392 layoffs, 20,044 were caused by restructuring, and 12,738 were due to closures. AI was responsible for 7,624 job cuts, and tariffs were only attributable to 294 last month.

Meanwhile, job creation did not come close to mitigating these layoffs. The payroll processing firm ADP announced only 22,000 jobs were created last month, the weakest numbers in three months and the worst January since the Covid-19 pandemic in 2021. Most of those job gains came from hiring in the health care industry, and came after 2025 had the weakest annual job growth in 22 years. Unemployment is also up, with 231,000 claims filed in the last week of January, an eight-week high, according to the Department of Labor.

All of this belies Trump’s claims that everything is going well and that his policies are good for American businesses and workers. His administration has resorted to pushing fake statistics to prop up its claims, but Trump can’t cover up the fact that more and more Americans are struggling to afford basic needs. All of this bad news is self-inflicted, as Trump has sabotaged an economy that was actually much better under Biden.

Weeks after their murders, Donald Trump is still bad-mouthing the two U.S. citizens slain by his administration in Minnesota.

The president continued to bash Alex Pretti and Renee Nicole Good during a sit-down interview with NBC News Wednesday, telling the network that while he was “not happy” with the outcome of their interactions with ICE and CBP agents, he didn’t believe that they were entirely innocent, either.

“He was not an angel, and she was not an angel,” Trump said. “You know, you look at some tapes going back.”

Pretti was an ICU nurse who worked in Veterans Affairs, while Good was a 37-year-old mother and award-winning poet.

“But still, I’m not happy with what happened there. Nobody could be happy,” Trump continued. “But I’m always going to be with our great people of law enforcement. ICE, police, we have to back them. If we don’t back them, we don’t have a country.”

Both Pretti and Good’s deaths were captured on camera, though the widely documented reality of the situation has not prevented the Trump administration from attempting to twist the narrative into one that benefits its immigration aims. In an effort to spin the story of their deaths, Trump and his allies have slandered Pretti and Good as “domestic terrorists” and even gone so far as to attack Pretti for owning a weapon, blatantly challenging his Second Amendment rights.

Almost immediately after Pretti was killed, DHS officials insisted that his death was justified on the basis that he had supposedly “approached officers with a 9mm semi-automatic handgun.”

Weeks later, more video evidence emerged that depicted a previous clash between Pretti and ICE, 11 days before federal agents shot him dead in the street. In the clip, Pretti can be seen shouting, spitting, and kicking a government SUV before several agents tackle him to the ground.

After the second video became widely publicized, Trump shared his renewed perspective on the ICU nurse, writing on Truth Social that Pretti was an “agitator” whose “stock has gone way down.”

Roughly two-thirds of Americans believe that Donald Trump’s immigration enforcement crackdown has gone too far, according to a new NPR/PBS/Marist poll released Thursday.

Sixty-five percent of respondents said Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents had “gone too far” in enforcing immigration laws, according to the poll taken at the end of January. That number has risen by 11 points since June 2025, and is driven by Democrats and independents, whose disapproval grew by double digits.

Meanwhile, 22 percent of respondents said that the actions of federal immigration agents “are about right,” down from 26 percent in June. Only 12 percent said the agents hadn’t gone far enough.

Overall, a majority of Americans do not approve of ICE. Six in 10 respondents said that they disapprove of the job ICE is doing, while just 33 percent approved. A majority of people also believed anti-ICE demonstrators, smeared by Trump officials as agitators and insurrectionists, were acting lawfully. Nearly six in 10 respondents said that anti-ICE demonstrations around the country were mostly people acting lawfully, while 40 percent disagreed.

Speaking to NBC News’s Tom Llamas Wednesday, Trump acknowledged that immigration enforcement had a serious image problem. “What happens is that, I think we do a phenomenal job, but I don’t think we’re good at public relations,” he said.

But that’s classic Trump, more concerned with what something looks like than what it actually is. And what his administration has committed is nothing less than an ethnic cleansing carried out by an untrained, extrajudicial gestapo imbued with “federal immunity”—something that doesn’t actually exist.

The surging disapproval for ICE comes amid a sweeping immigration crackdown in Minnesota that has seen hundreds of immigrants violently torn from their communities, and left two U.S. citizens dead. Trump and his administration officials smeared the citizens killed by federal agents and have since refused to apologize.

It seems that Republicans either don’t care about federal agents terrorizing an American city or perhaps they’re observing some alternative universe.

According to the NPR/PBS/Marist poll, 73 percent of Republicans said they approved of the job ICE was doing, and 77 percent said they believed ICE was making Americans safer. Seventy-five percent of Republicans said they believed that most anti-ICE demonstrations were people acting unlawfully.

Tulsi Gabbard somehow thinks that there is a matter of national security involving voting machines in Puerto Rico.

Reuters reports that the director of national intelligence sent a team to the U.S. territory in May to investigate voting machines as part of claims that Venezuela hacked them. The investigation ultimately did not produce any evidence for that claim, unnamed sources told the publication.

Gabbard’s office confirmed the investigation to Reuters, but denied it had any links to Venezuela, claiming that its purpose was to uncover vulnerabilities in voting machines there. Her team seized some of the machines and voting machine data as part of the investigation, calling it “standard practice in forensics analysis.”

“[The office of the director of national intelligence] found extremely concerning cyber security and operational deployment practices that pose a significant risk to U.S. elections,” the office said in a statement.

President Trump can’t let the 2020 election go, insisting that he actually won and that Democrats used fraud to steal it away. Gabbard appears to be his point person on trying to manufacture evidence for these claims, going to Georgia to seize 2020 ballots and sending her employees to Puerto Rico to seize machines. The end goal of the Trump administration remains unclear, but the president has expressed his wish to take over elections across the country.

The Democrats are folding on their demand that federal agents stop covering their faces with masks while making arrests.

After demanding ICE and other federal agents be banned from wearing face coverings, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer decided to fight for less, adding caveats and loopholes to their mask stances during a press conference on Wednesday.

“No secret police. I find it amazing that the Speaker of the House [thinks] they should be allowed to have masks,” Schumer said. “They need identification and no masks, except in extraordinary and unusual circumstances.”

“There are several demands that we will articulate on behalf of the American people,” Jeffries said. “Certainly, I think there’s agreement that no masks should be deployed in an arbitrary and capricious fashion, as has been the case, horrifying the American people.”

In what “extraordinary and unusual circumstances” would these masked militiamen be justified in hiding their identities? They are federal officers who are in quiet suburbs and city streets alike, going door to door and kidnapping, brutalizing, and killing people along the way. And how exactly does Jeffries think that ICE can wear masks in a manner that isn’t arbitrary or capricious?

Above all, this is yet another confusing concession from a party whose base is desperately starving for its leaders to do something, anything, to stop the Trump administration from continuing to enact terror in their communities. Jeffries and Schumer are once again appealing to the GOP’s good faith and honesty—a move that has yet to actually work for them.

The president believes he has a “right” to use the Justice Department as his own personal law firm.

Speaking at the 74th National Prayer Breakfast Thursday morning, Donald Trump seemed to think that criticism of his intent to abuse the executive branch was all one big joke.

“And then they say, ‘Donald Trump is using the Justice Department to get even,’” Trump parroted through his teeth. “And I don’t. But wouldn’t I have a right to?

“Think of it. There’s never been a president in history treated the way I got treated,” he added.

But Trump does not have a right to utilize the DOJ for his personal whims. In the aftermath of former President Richard Nixon’s Watergate scandal, Attorney General Griffin Bell laid out new bedrock principles in order to prevent the agency’s independence from crumbling under the pressure of the White House.

They included new procedures and principles to prevent partisan interests from influencing legal judgements, safeguards to protect the DOJ’s “neutral zone,” and assurances that the department’s attorneys “must always be committed to good judgment and integrity,” according to the Brenner Center for Justice.

And yet the agency has tossed out decades of precedent since Trump returned to office last year thanks to the stewardship of its leader, Attorney General Pam Bondi, who has bent and capitulated to Trump and his whims at practically every turn.

Earlier this week, Justice Department officials began daily meetings to reignite efforts to investigate and punish government officials that played a role in investigating Trump prior to his return to the White House, meeting under the banner of Bondi’s “Weaponization Working Group.”

The group was designed to challenge former special counsel Jack Smith and his staff, as well as Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg and New York Attorney General Letitia James. The initiative would also target any officials that attempted to hold Trump accountable in the wake of the January 6 attack.

After concluding that his administration needed a “softer touch” on immigration, President Donald Trump delivered remarks Thursday at the National Prayer Breakfast that quickly devolved into a wildly racist tirade against immigrants.

“We have to get the bad ones out,” Trump said, claiming that immigrants were a threat to innocent churchgoers. “You can’t have people going to churches and coming out and have criminals taking advantage, and doing things that nobody even wants to describe.”

Trump claimed his immigration enforcement crackdown in Washington, D.C., had removed scores of “monsters” from the streets. “We took out over 2,000 hardcore criminals. You know, two percent of the population produces 90 percent of the violent crime,” he said.

In reality, federal data suggests that more than 80 percent of the immigrants arrested in response to Trump’s so-called “crime emergency” in Washington had no prior criminal records at all, which is part of a broader national trend of targeting law-abiding immigrants.

To illustrate his point, Trump claimed that he’d single-handedly saved the capital’s restaurant industry. “The restaurant would be robbed with people sitting there. ‘Hold up your hands, everybody! Give us your money!’ And then they’d whack people with the butt of a gun,” he said.

Trump also openly mocked Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey for urging Trump to abide by the U.S. Constitution in his lawless crackdown in Minnesota.

“‘This is the Constitution of the United States’—People don’t want to be mugged!” Trump cried. “They don’t want to have a murderer living next door that was, you know, killed three people in a certain country and is now living beautifully here. Because generally speaking, if they’ve killed in another country, they’re not gonna be the best of citizens.

“These are some of the meanest, most vicious people. They only gave us the worst,” Trump said, before turning to Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, who had once offered to take “homegrown” American citizens Trump wanted to deport.

“He’s sent us a few. I don’t want to talk to him about it,” Trump joked. “But he sends us some real bad ones.

“Isn’t it true that you will not send your good people to the United States? Wouldn’t you say? Look at him, he doesn’t know. He said, ‘What’s going on here?’ But no, he sends bad people to the United States,” Trump said.

Trump couched his criticism by saying that South American and Latin American leaders were “streetwise” in their supposed decisions about what citizens to keep and who to send away—which among other things, is definitely not how immigration works. “They cherish their good people, they only send us their bad people,” he said.

Trump’s fearmongering about immigrants is not only wildly racist—it’s also anti-Christian, going against the very Bible he hawks to his followers.

Leviticus 19:32-34 states, “When a foreigner resides among you in your land, do not mistreat them. The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt.”

Former Vice President Kamala Harris has rebranded her KamalaHQ social media account, sparking rumors of another presidential run.

On Wednesday evening, she announced a relaunch of KamalaHQ on X, the account that served as her primary social media presence during the 2024 election.

The video post featured a mock login page for the KamalaHQ account, and included multiple failed password attempts like “waytooonline,” “thebabysitterisweird,” and project2025wasreal” before “headquarters” worked. The post was captionless.

The initial reaction was disdain, as many assumed it was an announcement of her candidacy for 2028.

But on Thursday, Harris clarified that her social media accounts—which have seven million followers across X, TikTok, and Instagram—will be devoted to “an online organizing project for next generation campaigning.”

The new accounts will be called “Headquarters,” which they describe as “the new Gen-Z led progressive content hub.” The new username is “headquarters_67.”

“So KamalaHQ is turning into ‘Headquarters,’ and it’s where you can go online to get basically the latest of what’s going on, and also to meet and revisit with some of our great, courageous leaders,” Harris said in an announcement video from the account Thursday morning. “Stay engaged and I’ll see you out there.”

The account will be run by 501(c)(4) People for the American Way and Luminary Strategies, a consulting firm that emerged from Harris’s former social media team.

For what it’s worth, this hasn’t exactly quelled the initial rumors of Harris returning to the presidential fold, as this media arm could certainly be a part of that larger effort. But for now we can only speculate about the potential of this new “Headquarters.”

Virginia’s new Democratic governor, Abigail Spanberger, has ordered state agencies to stop cooperation with ICE.

Spanberger announced Wednesday in an executive order that four state agencies will be leaving ICE’s 287(g) program, including the state police and Department of Corrections. This means that these agencies won’t be making civil immigration arrests on behalf of ICE, rolling back an executive order from the previous governor, Republican Glenn Youngkin.

“Virginians deserve to have their state and local law enforcement resources devoted to the safety and security of their communities, not federal civil immigration enforcement,” the order states, adding that the current ICE agreements “improperly cede accountability and discretion over Virginia law enforcement to the federal government.”

While ending some state cooperation with ICE is a big step, many local sheriff’s offices and police departments in Virginia still have local agreements with the agency. But Spanberger’s move could be a precursor that Virginia’s House and Senate follow to restrict law enforcement relationships with ICE, especially considering that Democrats control both chambers.

Other states, such as California and Illinois, have already banned local law enforcement from working with ICE through the 287(g) program. On Tuesday, neighboring Maryland’s House and Senate voted to ban local police from the program as well. Support for ending cooperation with ICE is growing across the country as the deaths of Alex Pretti and Renee Good in Minneapolis and the agency’s violent detention of immigrants continue to horrify the public.

President Donald Trump says he has no clue why Tulsi Gabbard was spotted lurking around a federal raid at the election office in Fulton County, Georgia—but whatever the reason, it had to do with China!

During an exclusive interview Wednesday, NBC News’s Tom Llamas asked Trump point-blank why the director of national intelligence was present at the raid in Georgia.

“Why is Tulsi Gabbard there?” Llamas asked.

“I don’t know, but you know, uh, a lot of the cheating comes from, it’s international cheating,” Trump said. “You have people—they say—from China trying to, let me ask you, do you think China tries to influence our election?”

“We know that foreign governments try to influence a lot of things in this country,” Llamas replied.

“Well therefore, she’s foreign governments,” Trump said.

As per usual, it’s not clear whether the president was simply playing dumb or whether he’s actually clueless. But he used his garbled answer as a jumping-off point to boost long-debunked claims about election interference. However, a U.S. intelligence report released in 2021 resoundingly dispelled Trump’s and former officials’ repeated claims that China—not Russia—was the biggest threat to election integrity in 2020.

What’s more, The New York Times reported that Gabbard called the president on her cell phone after the raid. Trump initially didn’t pick up, but called back shortly after to talk to the agents on speakerphone. He thanked the agents and had questions for them.

Last week, White House officials spilled that Gabbard has spent months leading an investigation into Trump’s baseless claims about the results of the 2020 presidential election. Gabbard has reportedly regularly briefed Trump and his chief of staff Susie Wiles, as well as other well-known election deniers Cleta Mitchell, a far-right activist with the ear of the president, and Kurt Olsen, a former lawyer for the Trump campaign who helped mount the “Stop the Steal” lawsuits.