Welcome to Meet the Press Now.

I'm Kristen Welker in Washington, where the White House is defending some extremely incendiary comments by the president today,

criticizing a group of Democrats for their comments about the military and suggesting those Democrats' actions are punishable by death.

We'll have much more on all of that and the firestorm and the reaction on Capitol Hill in just a moment.

But it comes as the administration is confronting some dismal new poll numbers on how Americans feel about the president's economic agenda,

despite some stronger than expected jobs data out today, the Labor Department reporting that the U.S.

added 119,000 new jobs in September.

That's far more than economists were forecasting.

The release of the September jobs report delayed by the government shutdown.

And with the October jobs report canceled and November report delayed, this will be the last look

at the labor market before the Federal Reserve considers additional rate cuts next month.

And speculation about the Fed's next move triggered a wild day on Wall Street, where the

Dow saw swings of more than

a thousand points, closing down close to 400 points. White House Press Secretary Caroline Levitt

touted today's jobs report as evidence the economy is strong. Nearly all of this solid monthly

job growth came from the private sector and went to Americans rather than

foreign-born workers, the opposite of what we saw under the previous administration.

Inflation also remains under control and wages are up by 3.8% over the year for American

workers because of President Trump's pro-growth policies. But Americans' views of the overall

economy and President Trump's handling of it are on the decline. In a new Fox News poll,

76 percent of Americans view the economy as poor or just fair. Those numbers are worse than

Americans' opinion of the economy at the end of the Biden

...