Political analyst David Chalian practically spat fire Friday on CNN after President Donald Trump announced he was canning a labor official because he didn’t like the job numbers she released Friday.
Trump posted to Truth Social that Dr. Erika McEntarfer, the commissioner of Labor Statistics and a Biden appointee, published an “inaccurate” report revealing weaker-than-expected job numbers for May and June.
“There are two things here, just stepping back for a second, that I think are pretty clear,” Chalian began. “One, Donald Trump’s kind of giving away the fact that this is not a healthy, robust, growing economy at the moment. It’s a weakening economy, and he’s freaked out about it, right? I mean, just by the behavior.”
Chalian continued, “So, I mean 106,000 jobs over the last three months added — that’s not gangbusters. And he is concerned as he is selling his tariff policy that perhaps some of the predictions that a lot of economists made may come true here.”
Chalian described Trump as “clearly rattled” by the report.
“Two, this is like…firing your pollster for telling you that you’re way behind in the race! It’s like, no, like these are just numbers and facts,” Chalian said, noting that collecting the numbers isn’t an exact science but is meant to “get the best usable information for the government” at the moment.
“And so to think that you’re just going to fire — So, what does that mean?” Chalian sputtered. “He’s going to put in an ally now and he’s going to get different numbers? If this is the economy, if this is how many jobs are being added, he’s going to have to accept bad information from an ally.”
Earlier, CNN’s Phil Mattingly posted to X in response to the news of McEntarfer’s firing, “This displays an intentional ignorance toward the way economic data is collected, presented, revised and the federal employees and appointees who do it. It’s extraordinarily counterproductive and there’s simply no net long game benefit to going down this path.”