With the White House surveying the food situation in Gaza today and Vice President Harris making her first television appearance since losing the election, we now turn to the analysis of Brooks and Capehart. That is, New York Times columnist David Brooks and Jonathan Capehart of MSNBC. Welcome to you both. David, I want to start with the president's approach to the economy and really more to his power.

We did see him unveil a whole new slate of tariffs on a number of nations, including Canada.

And today, as we reported earlier, he chose to fire the labor official who's responsible for the jobs numbers after a lower than expected jobs report, accusing her of political manipulations.

The White House has cited those numbers before when they're in their favor, but what do you make of

this move? Well, it's not true. I mean, we've used these data. I would say some of the most

trusted arbiters of information are the BLS and the CBO, the Congressional Budget Office.

And there are professionals, and I've met some of them who do this work, and that's

all they care about is getting the numbers right.

I don't think it can cross Donald Trump's mind that there are neutral arbiters who are

objected and we are not politicized.

But this is the weakness of authoritarian or pseudo-authoritarian regimes, is they create an atmosphere in which it's not possible to be honest with the executive.

And so you walk around there filled with distorted information.

And the perverse thing about this is that the news is not terrible.

I mean, we had 70-some odd thousand jobs, new jobs.

That's not like, it's going to get worse, by the way, if the business cycle goes up and down as normal. Second, the economy is suffering because of the Trump tariff, Jason Furman, who was on earlier this week, said it's like you took a thousand bucks out of every family's household and then you did that for the rest of their lives. So there's cuts in growth and there's hints of stagflation, but it's not the recession

that a lot of economists are expecting because the tariffs were not as bad as a lot of

economists were expecting.

So the news is not bad, and Donald Trump's firing of this person is symptomatic of the

way information and honesty are being distorted up and down. And when Speaker Johnson

tried to discredit the CBO numbers on how much debt would be caused by the big, beautiful bill,

that was part of this process of getting rid of the umpires. When you have no umpires or referees,

you don't have a fair game. Jonathan, what do you make of this? Well, you know, I agree with everything that David says.

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