New York Times columnist say President Donald Trump may be about to lose the only advantage keeping his administration afloat.

Investment expert Steven Rattner said economic numbers released before Trump angrily fired his Bureau of Labor chief showed “substantial deceleration” in job growth, not just for the last month, but revised down for the two prior months.

“That is worrisome,” said Rattner “That suggests that the labor market is weakening significantly. And if you talk anecdotally to C.E.O.s, they will tell you that their hiring plans have come down substantially. If you talk to any young person who’s out in the job market right now, they will probably tell you that the job market has gotten a lot tougher.”

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This can “often be an early indicator of a trend,” said Rattner, however columnist Jamelle Bouie said Trump “doesn’t understand this” because his “advisers are too sycophantic” to tell him—to the detriment of his own political interests.

“… [T]he president can put pressure on the nation’s statisticians to make him look good, but if the underlying conditions are actually on the downturn, if things are actually getting worse for people, then the only thing he’s done is made it more difficult for his government to respond to whatever is bubbling up from the surface,” Bouie said.

This is a bigger problem for Trump than it might be for other presidents, said Bouie, because the only thing Trump has going for him, in the eyes of voters, is his perceived economy savviness.

“People don’t actually like him that much, and you see this in the polling whenever he gets back into power,” said Bouie. “People really do not like his general thing. But what they accept in this trade-off is Trump may be terrible in X, Y, or Z way, but he brings prosperity. He’s like this totem for wealth. If it turns out that under Trump there is a significant economic slowdown, if there is a recession even, I think that is a moment where the bottom could really fall out from under his administration.”

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“In the absence of any other compelling thing … to keep him buoyed up with the rest of the public, he just doesn’t have that much,” Bouie added.

“I’d suggest that’s actually already happening,” said Rattner. “…If you look at the polling data, he is unpopular himself. His job approval ratings are terrible: plus or minus 40 percent, depending upon which poll you look at. But people’s perception of the state of the economy has not improved at all since Trump came back.”

Political reporter Michelle Cottle said Trump’s move to fire the Bureau of Labor Chief “spotlights his panic about what’s happening, certainly how it will impact his party’s fortunes and whether he keeps a death grip on the government going forward.”

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