In mid-February, as Donald Trump’s State of the Union address neared, Peter Navarro, a leading White House voice on trade and economic policy, told Fox News that the U.S. economy was “perfect.” A week later, during JD Vance’s latest Fox News appearance, the vice president celebrated the “Trump boom” in the economy.
Soon after, the American public learned that economic growth during the first year of the president’s second term reached a nine-year low (excluding the pandemic). Late last week, the latest job numbers were even worse: The U.S. economy lost 90,000 jobs in February, and the unemployment rate inched higher.
Indeed, the closer one looked at the data, the worse the figures appeared. Trump has been in the White House for 14 months, and during that time the cumulative total is 150,000 jobs. In the last 14 months of Joe Biden’s presidency, by contrast, the American economy added 1.74 million jobs.
As economist Heather Long noted, the Republican president launched his “Liberation Day” tariffs in April 2025, and if we combine all of the jobs lost and gained between May 2025 and February 2026, there’s actually been a net loss in American jobs.
So much for the “Trump boom.”
Not surprisingly, Republican officials have no idea what to say about the worst job market since the Great Recession (again, excluding the pandemic). As The New York Times noted, “Republicans appeared to be put in a defensive posture by the weak data, with many elected officials and candidates staying quiet on the issue into Friday evening.”
Administration officials, however, settled on a specific talking point, which at first blush wasn’t ridiculous. National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett appeared on CNBC, for example, and urged people to “take the average over a few months,” as opposed to focusing too heavily on one individual month. Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer pushed a similar line during an appearance on Fox Business.
In theory, this is not an unreasonable position, since larger trends are more important than month-to-month fluctuations. But in practice, there are a couple of things to keep in mind.
First, recent averages don’t do the White House any favors, either. The economy not only shed jobs in February, it also lost jobs in two of the last three months, three of the last five months and five of the last nine months. (During Biden’s term, there were literally zero months in which the economy lost jobs.)
Put simply, since Trump returned to power, there has been no period of sustained, healthy job growth in the United States.
Second, arithmetic still matters.
During Chavez-DeRemer’s Fox Business appearance, the scandal-plagued labor secretary claimed, “Overall, we’ve gained 60,000 new jobs over the last two months.”
No, we haven’t. According to the Trump administration’s own Bureau of Labor Statistics, the economy added 126,000 jobs in January and then lost 92,000 jobs in February. That’s a combined total of 34,000, not 60,000.
What’s more, this approach includes some ugly averages. Monthly job growth of 17,000 to 30,000 is quite awful and not enough to keep up with population growth, as the nation’s labor secretary really ought to know.
What we’re left with, then, is an administration that’s both failing to create jobs and failing to put a positive spin on its failure to create jobs.
