MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough knocked down President Donald Trump’s justification for firing a labor statistician after the latest jobs report showed an economic slowdown.
The president abruptly fired Erika McEntarfer as commissioner of labor statistics Friday, hours after the agency reported job growth in the U.S. had slowed to a near-halt. He claimed the Joe Biden appointee had cooked the books in favor of the Democratic administration ahead of last year’s election, only to say those numbers were wrong after votes were cast.
“The more he talks about it, the more he just proves how wrong it was to fire this woman,” the “Morning Joe” host said. “First of all, he just said all the numbers leading up to this report were positive. He always praised her numbers. If he’s going to blame this on her instead of actually data, it wasn’t her.”
Trump has long praised McEntarfer for her work, and Scarborough said his claim about her job numbers before the 2024 election misrepresented the facts.
“He keeps going back to this, this line about, ‘Oh, they put out a blockbuster report right before the election’ – no, they didn’t,” Scarborough said. “That’s just not true. I mean, from the reports I saw, it was actually tepid and weak right before the election. So again, I know, I know, facts don’t matter in this case. But, again, it seems as far as fluctuations go, and that always happens, that has always happened. It always will happen, as far as the numbers being revised the next month or two.”
“The numbers are revised not because of any political bias, and not because of any political bias over the past two decades,” he added, “but because of employers not participating as much and it taking another month to get more details and pulling it out of the employers, and then they revise it a month later. So, again, on all of these points, they just don’t hold any water.”
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