Don’t Let Trump Fool You. The Economy Is Bad, and He Is to Blame.

Give Pete Navarro, President Donald Trump’s economics adviser and ex-con, credit score for gumption: He’s searching for to direct public consideration away from one of many White Home’s least-popular coverage initiatives to 1 that’s performing even worse in opinion polling. Throughout a Tuesday look on Fox Enterprise, Navarro cautioned the Trump faithful, “We’ve to revise expectations down considerably for what a month-to-month job quantity ought to appear to be.… Wall Road has to regulate for the truth that we’re deporting tens of millions of illegals out of the job market.”

Navarro’s downbeat appraisal of the job market is acquainted information. The Trump administration has averaged an anemic 49,000 increase in jobs per month, effectively below one-third the speed that Joe Biden’s financial system added.

At this time’s job numbers, because it occurs, got here in stronger than anticipated, with an estimated 130,000 new positions added in January—but downward changes in month-to-month studies present that virtually no employment growth occurred throughout 2025. The Trump administration’s already feeble job additions over the 12 months have been downgraded to a mere 181,000 positions, whereas 2024 noticed the addition of almost one million and a half new jobs. What’s extra, January’s hiring surge was mainly powered by hiring in healthcare—a sector by which immigrant labor plays a pivotal role. In different phrases, Navarro was fallacious in each his evaluation of hiring developments and in sizing up how mass deportation is affecting them. In the meantime, the structural malaise of the Trump financial system stays unchanged, hampered by Trump’s erratic-at-best tariffs, continued inflation, and sluggish efficiency in key sectors like housing and manufacturing.

After inaugurating his second time period with a vow to create an financial “Golden Age,” Trump has been a Midas in reverse. Over the past 12 months, one financial indicator after one other has gone to shit. The USA is now in the weakest jobs economy in a non-recession year since 2003, whereas the dimensions of layoffs in January hasn’t been matched since the annus horribilis 2009.

Navarro’s method to spinning the White Home’s dreadful financial efficiency is to shout, in essence, “Look over there!” However what’s placing is that in making an attempt to alter the topic, Navarro is taking part in up a dropping message for the administration. By blaming dangerous job numbers on the rolling immigration raids, he’s not solely underlining the utterly unforced nature of the administration’s botched jobs coverage; he’s invoking a mass-deportation marketing campaign that Individuals dislike and disown. A current NPR/Marist ballot exhibits that two-thirds of all respondents imagine that ICE’s immigration crackdowns have “gone too far”—an 11 p.c spike for the reason that raids started final summer time. That quantity really eclipses the share of respondents disapproving of the president’s dealing with of the financial system, which stood at 59 p.c in the identical ballot.

The broader political problem earlier than Trump’s GOP in a important midterm cycle is to make it seem to be progress and progress are gaining traction despite the proof earlier than voters’ eyes. You would name this the “managing decline” part of the Trump regime—an all-out effort to steer Individuals that worse is the truth is higher.

The zero-sum jobs-immigration tradeoff that Navarro floated is simply a part of the issue. The day earlier than Navarro’s interview, the White Home sent out its own memo to bolster shaky morale amongst MAGA true believers. “Don’t be a panican,” the headline blared. “We’re profitable and we’re not slowing down.” (Professional tip to the Trump messaging store: To rally sentiment behind you, it’s greatest to not lead with an ungainly portmanteau that nobody’s ever heard earlier than.)

The physique of the factor is simply what you’d anticipate: rudderless bids to personal the libs (“Whereas the Pretend Information and Radical Left collude to distract, depress, and divide, they’re merely mendacity to masks the plain fact: America is safer, stronger, richer, and safer than at any level in a long time”) mixed with flat-out untruths (a lurid laundry record of alleged hardened criminals detained by ICE, when the truth is less than 14 percent of the people dragooned into ICE custody have had a violent legal report, and gang members and terrorists—the so-called worst of the worst—make up just 2 percent of detainees; an absurd claim that there had been “report excessive crime throughout the nation below Biden’s defund the police period”).

For good measure, the memo consists of acrobatic bids to display measurable progress on the Trump administration’s bullying, hate-mongering agenda. Right here’s one pattern: “After the Trump Administration surged federal assets into crime-plagued Washington, D.C.”—the fable of a violent and chaotic DC being another agitprop lie—“the District went three weeks into the new year earlier than recording its first murder—the primary time the nation’s capital had gone greater than ten days into a brand new 12 months and not using a homicide in a minimum of three a long time.” (The memo might need famous that this was additionally the longest stretch of homicide-free life in DC whereas we’ve kidnapped and indicted the primary couple of Venezuela, for all of the sense its personal chosen metric of temporal comparability made.) Beneath “On a regular basis Prices Proceed Moderating” (a subheading that couldn’t have sounded convincing to even the memo’s authors), we discover a quotation of a six-month lower in rents—a sector by which the federal authorities exercises weak authority. Then, for some purpose, there’s this: “PepsiCo introduced value cuts of as much as 15% on core manufacturers.” (Comply with-up professional tip to White Home message wizards: Whenever you produce a speaking level that’s basically “Allow them to drink Pepsi,” you’re undoubtedly not profitable.)

What makes the administration’s managing-decline messaging so futile is the failure of its apparatchiks to come clean with the results of their very own coverage calls. When MAGA toadies like Navarro blame their very own lackluster job efficiency on the ICE deportation complicated, they’re successfully assigning blame to senior officers like ICE director Todd Lyons, who simply handed in a classic “I don’t know anything about anything” performance in testimony earlier than the Home Homeland Safety Committee. With all arms of the administration serving as alibis for the failure of any one in every of them, nobody is finally liable for something. Occasions are clearly constructing to a degree when the Trump White Home will revert to January 6 kind and discover a option to blame every little thing on Mike Pence.

The opposite signal that MAGA is sunk in its managing-decline part is its bid to dictate the essential phrases of sports activities fandom and leisure viewing within the face of a mass viewers basically tired of what it has to say on these topics. When US Olympic skier Hunter Hess voiced ambivalence about representing a repressive and bigoted authorities within the 2024 Winter Video games, Trump laid into him in a raving Truth Social post. Whinging Trump sycophant Florida Senator Rick Scott adopted up with an X declaration that every one US Olympic athletes criticizing the nation should be stripped of team membership, demonstrating for the umpteenth time that the right-wing castigation of “cancel tradition” was a lot scorching air.

To not be outdone, Texas GOP Consultant Mark Alford has introduced plans to comply with up Trump’s social-media meltdown over Dangerous Bunny’s Tremendous Bowl halftime efficiency with a congressional investigation for… causes. Right here’s Alford’s stab at justifying a congressional probe, which in some way makes Scott seem to be a statesmanlike defender of First Modification freedoms by comparability: “We’re nonetheless investigating this. There’s a variety of info that has come out in regards to the lyrics.… These lyrics, whether it is true, what was mentioned on nationwide tv, now we have a variety of questions for the… entities that broadcast this, and we’ll be speaking with Brendan Carr from the FCC about this.” In different phrases, the Trumpified GOP is setting itself as much as mount an ongoing assault on a musical efficiency that earned rave critiques, drew an viewers of 135 million viewers in the US, and even coaxed a number of MAGA influencers into shows of appreciative fandom. That’s arguably the last word type of managing decline: believing you’re mounting a well-liked and heroic culture-war campaign if you end up, the truth is, solely speaking to your self.