Just hours before Donald Trump announced he was firing the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Vice President JD Vance was celebrating some cherry-picked numbers from the latest jobs report.
In a post on X Friday, Vance shared a graph based on the most recent BLS data from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, claiming that in the last four months, native-born workers had gained a whopping 1.8 million jobs while foreign-born workers had lost 1.5 million jobs. The number of foreign-born workers included both documented and undocumented workers.
“I was told 6 months ago that Americans losing jobs and the foreign-born gaining jobs was an irreversible demographic fact,” Vance wrote. “Turns out you just needed a new president and a new immigration policy.”
As per usual, Vance was a little behind the curve.
Within hours, Trump had directed his administration to fire BLS Commissioner Dr. Erika McEntarfer, a Biden-appointee. “Important numbers like this must be fair and accurate, they can’t be manipulated for political purposes,” the president wrote in a post on Truth Social, torching the very numbers Vance had been toasting him over.
The latest jobs report revised the number of new jobs created by 258,000 in just two months—a revision on par with those that Trump had railed the Biden administration over ahead of the presidential election. It’s honestly amazing that Vance was able to find anything to celebrate in the dismal report, which saw only 73,000 jobs created in July, trailing estimates by more than 30,000.