And good morning. It is Saturday, August 2nd. I'm Ali Valshi, and I'm speaking to you this morning from the wrong side of yet another perilous line our country has crossed under Donald Trump.

Today we're all waking up in a country headed by a

president who, when faced with empirical data that he doesn't like, will fire the government

official who collected it. Yesterday, we all got some bad news, an alarmingly bad monthly

employment report that revealed a far more fragile jobs market than we thought we had. Only 73,000 net new jobs. That's new jobs created,

minus jobs lost, were added in July. That's a weak number. But worse were the revisions to the

two previous jobs reports. May's job report was revised from 144,000 net new jobs to only 19,000.

June's 147,000 net new jobs were mostly a mirage as well,

turned out to be only 14,000 jobs that were added that month.

That's 258,000 fewer jobs than previously thought,

which means the average for the last three months is 35,000, far fewer than the 150,000 or more that are needed for job growth to keep up with population growth in this country.

Now, revisions to government statistics are normal in subsequent months. It's the nature of large numbers. They happen regularly,

but they almost never show this dramatic a shift. It was a bad report. There's no doubt about it,

and bad particularly for a president who in political terms owns this job market and this economy,

which has been roiled by the chaos of his tariffs and his trade wars. But instead of addressing

the numbers and the challenge they present,

the president said they were fake,

and he fired the head of the department that collects them.

Trump baselessly claimed the jobs numbers were rigged.

He accused the fired commissioner of inflating numbers for the Biden administration

and sabotaging jobs for them under this administration.

Mr. Brick, why didn't you fire the end of the Bureau of Labor statistic?

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