Mr. President, why don't you fire the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics? Because I think our numbers were wrong. The jobs report today were rigged. Oh, yeah, I think so. I think you'll see some very interesting information coming out, but we got rid of. You have to have honest reports going forward. [00:00:16] - Why should anyone. - Trust the numbers? And if you're. You're right. No. You're right. Why should anybody trust numbers? So you know what I did? I fired her. That's right. He fired her because the latest jobs report coming out from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the revisions to previous jobs reports [00:00:35] from both May and June of this year has upset President Donald Trump to the point where he has decided to fire the commissioner of the BLS. Her name is Erica McIntyre, and apparently he thinks that she's cooking the books, cooking the numbers. [00:00:51] But is there any truth behind it? No. Now let's get into the details of what the July jobs report indicated and what the revisions were for the previous two months. So jobs numbers came in below expectations for July at 73,000 jobs. [00:01:09] Now, economists were expecting somewhere between 110,000 to 140,000 jobs. But now, with the revisions that have been made for the reports that came out in May and June, it's very likely that even that 73,000 number might be revised to be lower. [00:01:24] We're going to have to wait and see. Now here's where things start to get very strange. Okay. So look, while tariffs are supposed to spur domestic manufacturing jobs, the sector has actually lost jobs. In fact, 11,000 manufacturing jobs in July alone. [00:01:41] Now the revised jobs report also indicates that the amount of jobs was overcalculated in June by a lot, by a whopping 258,000 jobs. Okay. So original jobs report said that [00:01:57] the economy added 147,000 jobs in June. Then revised it down to only 14,000 jobs. Now, look, I think that Trump is quick to retaliate against government officials that he disagrees with or he feels are like trying to go [00:02:14] after him politically in some way. Put Trump aside for a second. How do you make a how do you make a revision that big? How do you go from a whopping 147,000 jobs and revise it down to just 14,000in June? Then you look at May. The previous BLS report said that the labor market [00:02:31] added 144,000 jobs that month. Then the revision revised the number down to just 19,000 jobs added to the economy in May of this year. - That's a pretty huge revision. - Yeah. Okay. No, it's not that big a deal at all. [00:02:48] So, the job numbers get changed all the time. She explains why the numbers are getting less and less reliable. We'll share that with you in a second. Guys, think about the conspiracy theory that Trump has. Okay. [00:03:03] She had to adjust the numbers down for the last two months. Okay, well, what does that mean? That means she had the numbers grossly inflated the last two months. Right. So why was she doing that in favor of Donald Trump? That helps Donald Trump's a lot. [00:03:18] The last two months, as he gets to say you thought jobs were going to go down. My tariffs are awesome. My big beautiful bill that's going to give tax cuts to all the rich is awesome. Okay. If there's any conspiracy theory it's that they made the job numbers look great. So the tax cuts would pass. But there isn't. [00:03:35] She's just a bureaucrat and a bureaucrat. I read up on our history, on her history, and these numbers fluctuate wildly because their estimates and then the real numbers are closer to the real numbers come in, they get changed up and down all the time. And I don't know why she would want to help Trump in the last two months [00:03:52] if that conspiracy is true and then decide, you know what? No, I'm against Trump now. I'm going to take the numbers down so it makes 0% logical sense. Exactly. Look, when it comes to Trump and I want to be very clear, because I don't want people to conflate what I'm trying to say. [00:04:07] Trump has no evidence that the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics was cooking the numbers to hurt him in any way. Okay. I just made that statement. Please put that aside for a second. I get that the numbers do get revised. It does fluctuate. [00:04:23] But I mean, look, the big argument that we're hearing from economists and various experts who are being interviewed all throughout the media today is what Trump is doing is going to lead to distrust of this government agency. Fair point. But shouldn't we have been a little bit skeptical about the initial numbers coming [00:04:41] out from this government agency anyway, given how much the numbers get revised and the extent to which they get revised? And I understand what you're saying. It's a perfectly legitimate question. The reason why I would say no overall is with with the caveat. A caveat is as, again, we're going to show you in a sec that the numbers are getting [00:04:59] less and less reliable as we go because of phones and being able to reach people. Right. But overall this has happened for time immemorial. This is not an agency that all of a sudden has this yo yoing up and down and unreliable numbers. There are a lot of agencies like that. [00:05:14] And overall, and to your point about we shouldn't trust the government in the first place is super well received, I totally agree. Right. But this has been both according to Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, a fairly reliable part of the government that just does numbers. [00:05:31] I mean, I'm sure he misspoke, but you heard the on tape there Trump saying, why should anyone trust numbers? I mean, numbers are facts. Numbers are as close to facts as you can get. But so that's why I get why you're bothered by it. [00:05:46] - Because bothered by. - This. Because it looked like it was a fact. And now you're showing me a completely different number. But we are now in August. It is August. We just got the new jobs report, which included the revisions to May months ago and June. Okay, two months ago. They do revisions like that all the time. [00:06:03] To this extent. I mean, I'm sorry, how do you go from 147,000 jobs and revise it all the way down to just 14,000 jobs? Because there's 330 million people in the country. That's why these numbers historically fluctuate. I've never seen any other president complain about fluctuations, [00:06:21] including this size. That's fair, that's fair. If that's what we're all going to accept, then when the initial jobs report comes out and there's all these news stories about it, we should just ignore it. - We should just. - Ignore. No, no. But that's part of my point, which is that so Trump wanted the credit from the last two months when apparently the numbers were inflated. [00:06:37] And now that they fixed the numbers, he's like, no, that's it. I'm going to fire her and look more important than any of this guys. Is do we have a functioning government or is this. A no no we don't. - That's my problem. - Is this a banana republic? And so there's two different issues in this story. One is the one that Anna's pointing out, which is that we're having so much trouble [00:06:54] trusting any of our institutions. Exactly. Because no matter where you go in the government, somebody has an agenda, right? Oh, no, you got to do that for Israel. You got to do that for the oil companies. Wait, do you work for us or do you work for the goddamn oil companies, right? So that there's a failure of all of our institutions to earn our trust. [00:07:11] And then secondly, now Trump has, instead of making it better, has made it worse. Yes. And so he pours fuel on that fire. It's like that Zoolander scene when they start pouring the gas all over themselves. And he's like, okay, I like your numbers the last two months, but these this month, I don't like your numbers politically, so I don't like your factual correctness. [00:07:30] I'm going to fire you for that. The next person should know I want political correctness. The politically correct position is the numbers always go up. But by the way, that's also super stupid. If you're a Trump fan and I don't mean the fans are stupid. I'm saying Trump's idea is stupid because if you like Trump, you he's insisting [00:07:49] that the interest rates go down and you want the interest rates to go down. If the job numbers are lower, the interest rates are more likely to go down. - Get cut in. - September. At this point, it's a near certainty that the Federal Reserve, based on these [00:08:04] revisions in the jobs reports, will cut interest rates in September, which is something that Trump absolutely loves. But he's faced with a very clear paradox here, right? He wants easy money. He loves that cheap money from the Federal Reserve, which, [00:08:20] by the way, does distort our economy and does lead to asset bubbles. But okay. People love the cheap money, I get it. We're addicted to it in the United States. But at the same time, the Federal Reserve isn't going to cut interest rates until they grapple with inflation, which had slowed down a little bit. But more importantly, remember what Jerome Powell, [00:08:38] the head of the Federal Reserve, has been saying repeatedly over and over again. One of the best indicators of whether the Federal Reserve will cut interest rates is if unemployment goes up. And these revisions make it clear that unemployment is starting to tick up a little bit. [00:08:54] So, for instance, hold on before I forget, Jake. So the rate of unemployment did increase just slightly from 4.1% in June to 4.2% in July. - Go ahead. - Yeah. Look, guys, if you're a Republican voter, you still like Donald Trump. [00:09:09] You got to expect better from your leaders. We asked Democratic leaders to be better. We didn't get it, but we asked for it. You should ask for it, too, because Donald Trump says, I want lower interest rates from the Federal Reserve, and I want higher jobs numbers. But guys, that doesn't make any sense. [00:09:26] Higher job numbers means he fed is less likely to cut rates. So okay. So we explain that. So then take the next logical step. Oh my god. Trump doesn't even know the basics about economics. He doesn't know that if he wants the fed to lower the rates, he should be happy [00:09:43] that the job numbers temporarily are down. That's the perfect opportunity for him to say, see, I told you, you got to lower the interest rates. Instead, he's like me, not like it. Me want higher job numbers, but then the fed won't reduce the rate. - He doesn't understand that. - But the jobs number. [00:09:58] Jesus Christ man. If you're a plumber, I get it. But if you're the president of the United States, do one hour of homework, brother. This is why I say that he's confronted with a bit of a paradox. Because he wants to look good. He wants to look as though his policies have spurred growth in our economy. [00:10:14] But these numbers and the revisions that have now been put out by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, show that our economy has slowed down. Now, yes, that gives the Federal Reserve the perfect reason or excuse to cut interest rates, which Trump wants. [00:10:31] But at the same time, yeah, it's going to look like his economic policies because there is some fact behind it, truth behind it, that some of his economic policies are starting to slow the economy down. I think the way that our economy works is pretty messed up, that in order to get access to cheap money through cuts in the interest rates, [00:10:50] you need to see suffering among the American people in regard to joblessness. So let's get to some more details as we're now learning them as a result of this report. So in 2025, the industries that have seen the largest numbers of job cuts happen to Happened to be, technology, [00:11:11] 89,251 job cuts in that sector and retail, 80,487 job cuts in that sector. So I apparently has cut more than 20,000 jobs in the tech sector this year alone. And you also can't discount the fact that the federal workforce, which is [00:11:29] counted into the jobs report, has shrunk by 84,000 jobs since January of this year with 12,000 job losses in July alone. Now, the rate of wage growth has also been slowing down, but that's been the trend since 2022. [00:11:47] Now, for those who are wondering, well, who is this commissioner? You know, she is a career, you know, federal government employee. So she spent most of her career at the Census Bureau. She is a numbers person. She led a program to produce economic statistics and finer grained detail [00:12:05] on people and places for the census. Then in 2022, she joined Biden's White House Council of Economic Advisors. Biden then nominated her to lead the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and she won confirmation early last year in a pretty significant vote, [00:12:20] 86 to 8. But she's known for her nonpartisan work ethic and also served in Trump's first term. During Trump's first administration, his daughter Ivanka Trump led a white House initiative to bolster workforce training, which included Meggendorfer. [00:12:37] That's the woman we're talking about here. Then, at census, Meggendorfer was an important member of a team working on statistics for the project, which ended when Trump left office. Now, to be fair again, BLS has made revisions. [00:12:52] Historically, this isn't rare. The extent to which the numbers change, though, I feel. Or fluctuated over the last few months, I think is a little strange. But for one, data kept getting released early. And this is something that this is kind of unrelated to the whole tiff with Trump. [00:13:11] Okay. But I think it's important to know this, and I think this should be investigated. So the Wall Street Journal uncovered the fact that in August of last year, the Bureau of Labor Statistics had released numbers to Wall Street 30 minutes before they did so to the general public. [00:13:28] That's a problem. Some Wall Street firms received access to labor market data roughly 30 minutes before the public. They claim that it was an accident. I'm not going to take anyone's word for it. Obviously, if Wall Street is going to have information that the general public is not privy to, that retail investors are not privy to, [00:13:47] they're going to be able to make trades based on that information that the general public isn't privy to. So that should be investigated. And, you know, there are other issues as well and policy decisions at the center of the problem. For instance, the Wall Street Journal reported this year that the agency has increasingly [00:14:03] relied on guesswork to calculate some of its biggest data releases because of staff shortages caused by a federal hiring freeze. Meanwhile, fewer families and businesses answer the phone when BLS workers call to conduct surveys. In recent months, the response rate for the survey that drives unemployment [00:14:23] figures has hovered below 70%, down from nearly 90% a decade ago. So that goes to the point that you are making. There's been some changes in how people respond to these types of surveys, and that has had a negative impact on the accuracy of the BLS reports. [00:14:39] Yeah. I want to go back to something you were saying. So that Wall Street, getting the news half an hour before the rest of the public is unconscionable. They can make billions off of that. And it is. It's insider trading one on one. The head of the BLS did not do that. It was somebody inside the organization. [00:14:57] Of all the things that we just covered in this story, that's the most important because the rest of it is just fake, like, oh, Trump's feelings and stuff, right? So that that's real. Who the hell leaked it to Wall Street? Because guys, think about it. I mean, billions turn on information like that. [00:15:13] If they get $1 million, $10 million is nothing compared to what the money they can make. How our government's leaking like a sieve. And let's note for the record that when the Democrats were in charge, the Republicans said, oh, we should do the Stock act and no more insider trading by members of Congress. [00:15:28] And Republicans are like, no, no, no. Now that they've flipped, Republicans are in charge. Now the Republicans are like, no, no, no. And the Democrats are pretending they want to do it right. So they're just giving information to themselves and to their donors nonstop. And that goes to Anna's point about losing faith in our institutions. [00:15:44] There's only one piece of good news out of any of this. All right. Silver lining is I was on Piers Morgan this morning. Right. And what happened to Democratic supporters who are still saying no, Joe Biden is young and dynamic. And they were getting swarmed and overwhelmed by everyone, right? Like, no, you're being ridiculous. Especially after the debate right now, it's happening to Trump supporters [00:16:02] who are just partizans. So Kari Lake's on there going, oh yeah, we should fire anyone who disagrees with Trump. And everybody else is like, yeah, that's ridiculous, that's stupid, and we can't stand it anymore. Right. So, like, the Partizans are beginning to lose in a big, big way. [00:16:18] And I love it. I'm here for. It. We need accurate data and information. Period. Right. Yeah. And. And firing the commissioner solely based on politics, which is what Trump did is wrong. And obviously, I'm a million times against it. [00:16:34] At the same time, clearly there are some issues at BLS and they need to figure out how to improve their methodology in order to get accurate or as close to accurate numbers as possible. Agreed. And final point goes to one of our members on wkyt.com. Be part of the show. [00:16:49] Go to tyt.com/join and be part of our commentary on our Brett Michael pointed out he does not want a banana republic. He said give me an Anna Republic. Oh interesting. - Okay. - Okay. - It sounds a lot. - Better, doesn't it? [00:17:06] I'm here for it. Every time you ring the bell, an angel gets his wings. Totally not true. But it does keep you updated on our live shows.