Trump defends firing labor statistics chief by lying about her role in 2024 campaign – as it happened

Why are the federal government’s monthly job reports on US employment revised so often?

William Beach, a conservative economist who was Donald Trump’s hand-picked labor statistics commissioner during his first term, explained to CNN in January that the core problem, making initial estimates of job gains often inaccurate and subject to revision, is that the federal agency still relies on surveys, conducted in-person and over the phone, in an era when response rates have plummeted.

“With lower response rates, our estimates are going to be more volatile, and our benchmark revisions (which typically factor in hard data sources such as tax records) are going to be greater,” Beach told the broadcaster.

“With the larger revisions and the statistical system kind of on its heels, people are taking pot shots at the data,” Beach said days after Trumps’ second inaugural. “It’s very unfortunate that they’re doing it, and it’s being done left and right. It’s not a Republican or Democrat thing. It’s just politicians finding good targets.”

Despite Beach’s both-sides framing, there is no doubt that when it comes to suggest that the government labor data is manipulated for partisan reasons, Trump is the Truther-in-chief.

Trump has claimed this for years, frequently casting doubt on job numbers, and other economic data produced by the bureau of labor statistics, like inflation data and the Consumer Price Index (CPI).

Just last week, Trump repeated the claim he has made since returning to office, that prices on “groceries are down”. In fact, the CPI shows that prices are up 0.6% since January.

And when it comes to job reports, Trump insisted during the 2024 campaign that the Biden-Harris administration had been “caught fraudulently manipulating job statistics” when the bureau of labor statistics reported in August that new data showed that 818,000 fewer jobs had been created in the previous year than it had initially estimated.

“New Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that the Administration PADDED THE NUMBERS with an extra 818,000 Jobs that DO NOT EXIST, AND NEVER DID. The real Numbers are much worse than that,” Trump wrote on Truth Social the morning that revised data was released.

The obvious flaw in Trump’s logic then was that the initial estimates he called fake and the downward revision he cited as evidence of that fakery were both produced by the same people: the team of over 2,000 economists, researchers and data scientists led by Erika McEntarfer, the commissioner of labor statistics he fired on Friday for reporting another downward revision.

As the University of Michigan economist Justin Wolfers observed on Friday: “When preliminary payrolls numbers overestimated job growth under Biden – and were later revised down – Trumpland claimed this was the BLS trying to prop up the President. Today he interprets it as the BLS is trying to undermine him.”

Firing “the wonk in charge of the statisticians who track economic reality”, Wolfers added, “is an authoritarian four alarm fire. It will also backfire: you can’t bend economic reality, but you can break the trust of markets. And biased data yields worse policy.”

Speaking to reporters on Friday, Donald Trump defended his decision to fire Erika McEntarfer, the commissioner of labor statistics, and falsely accused her of having released reports just before the 2024 election that overstated the number of new jobs created by the Biden-Harris administration.

Asked by a reporter, “Why did you fire the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics?” Trump replied: “Because I think her numbers were wrong, just like I thought her numbers were wrong before the election.”

The president then went on to give a wildly inaccurate account of the jobs data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics in 2024.

“Days before the election, she came out with these beautiful numbers for Kamala, I guess Biden-Kamala, and she came out with these beautiful numbers trying to get somebody else elected,” Trump said, entirely misrepresenting the jobs report released on 1 November 2024, four days before the election, which in fact showed the US added just 12,000 jobs over the previous month.

At the time, the Trump campaign called the jobs report “a catastrophe” that “definitively reveals how badly Kamala Harris broke our economy”.

On Friday, however, the president offered a very different account of that report released just nine months ago.

“Then, right after the election,” Trump claimed, “she had an 8- or 900,000 dollar [sic] massive reduction, said she made a mistake.”

What Trump was misremembering is a Bureau of Labor Statistics announcement, on 21 August 2024, that updated data showed that there had been 818,000 fewer jobs added in the US in the previous year than it had initially estimated. That downward revision was large, but part of an annual process, in which the bureau updates its initial estimates when it gets better data.

The same day that revision was announced in 2024, Trump, who was then recalibrating his campaign to focus on Kamala Harris, posted on Truth Social that the Biden-Harris administration had been “caught fraudulently manipulating Job Statistics” and the “New Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that the Administration PADDED THE NUMBERS with an extra 818,000 Jobs that DO NOT EXIST, AND NEVER DID.”

On Friday, however, Trump repeatedly insisted that the August revision had not come until after the November election.

Before leaving for another long weekend of golf, Trump repeated his false claim about McEntarfer, the commissioner of labor statistics he just fired, to another reporter.

“Before the election,” Trump recalled, wrongly, “she gave out numbers that were so good for the Democrats, it was like unbelievable.”

“And then right after the election, she corrected those numbers with, I think, almost 900,000 correction,” he said, referring incorrectly to the revision that had taken place in August and had been a boon to his campaign.

“Well today she did the same thing, with the 253,000, whatever the number was,” Trump added, referring to McEntarfer’s last act of office: Friday’s announcement that the US economy added 258,000 fewer jobs in May and June than previously estimated.

Bill Beach, a former Heritage foundation economist who was picked by Donald Trump in 2018 to oversee labor statistics, denounced on Friday what he called the “totally groundless firing of Dr Erika McEntarfer, my successor as Commissioner of Labor Statistics at BLS”.

Beach added that Trump’s order to remove the bearer of bad news on jobs “sets a dangerous precedent and undermines the statistical mission of the Bureau”.

He also co-signed a statement with Erica Groshen, who served as the commissioner before him, from 2013 to 2017, which began:

Today, President Trump called into question the integrity of the Employment Situation report that the BLS released this morning. He accused BLS Commissioner Erika McEntarfer of deliberately reporting false numbers to reflect poorly on this administration. This baseless, damaging claim undermines the valuable work and dedication of BLS staff who produce the reports each month. This escalates the President’s unprecedented attacks on the independence and integrity of the federal statistical system.

The President seeks to blame someone for unwelcome economic news. The Commissioner does not determine what the numbers are but simply reports on what the data show. The process of obtaining the numbers is decentralized by design to avoid opportunities for interference. The BLS uses the same proven, transparent, reliable process to produce estimates every month. Every month, BLS revises the prior two months’ employment estimates to reflect slower-arriving, more-accurate information.

This rationale for firing Dr McEntarfer is without merit and undermines the credibility of federal economic statistics that are a cornerstone of intelligent economic decision-making by businesses, families, and policymakers. US official statistics are the gold standard globally. When leaders of other nations have politicized economic data, it has destroyed public trust in all official statistics and in government science.

Other experts and elected officials were equally scathing in their response to Trump’s move.

“This will make it difficult to trust government sources on economic and financial data,” Rohit Chopra, the former director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, wrote. “Many businesses and investors use these data sets to determine where they want to launch or grow, so this will have real costs.”

“Instead of helping people get good jobs, Donald Trump just fired the statistician who reported bad jobs data that the wanna-be king doesn’t like,” Elizabeth Warren, the Massachusetts senator and bankruptcy law expert, posted.

“No. Mr. President,” Bernie Sanders, the Vermont senator, wrote. “In America, you do not fire the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics for releasing a jobs report that you don’t like. That’s what authoritarians do. We need serious economists in these positions, not hacks who will only tell you what you want to hear.”

US stocks slumped on Friday, with the S&P on track for its biggest daily percentage decline in more than three months as Donald Trump unveiled new import tariffs on dozens of trading partners and a surprisingly weak jobs report spurred selling pressure.

Shares in Amazon also fell after the company failed to meet expectations for its Amazon Web Services cloud computing unit.

Just hours before Trump’s latest self-imposed tariff deadline on Friday, the president signed executive orders imposing import taxes on goods imported from around the globe, including key trading partners such as Canada, Brazil, India, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and the 27-nation European Union.

Investor confidence was also hit by new data showing that US job growth slowed more than expected in July, and was significantly lower than previously reported in May and June. Those job numbers prompted Trump to fire the messenger, commissioner of labor statistics Erika McEntarfer.

The jobs report significantly pushed up expectations that the Federal Reserve will cut interest rates at its next meeting in September.

According to preliminary data, the S&P 500 lost 101.60 points, or 1.60%, to end at 6,237.79 points, while the Nasdaq Composite fell 472.78 points, or 2.24%, to 20,649.67. The Dow Jones industrial average lost 543.97 points, or 1.23%, to close at 43,587.01.

The Federal Reserve has announced that Adriana D Kugler will step down early from her position as governor of the Federal Reserve Board on 8 August.

Her term was due to expire in January, but her early resignation gives Donald Trump an opportunity to more quickly appoint someone who could eventually replace Jerome Powell as chair.

In a speech earlier this month, the New York Times notes that Kugler said the Fed should not cut interest rates “for some time” as tariffs trickle through to consumer prices.

Responding to Ghislaine Maxwell’s move to a minimum-security federal prison camp in Texas, a senior administration official has told NBC News that prisoners are “routinely moved” due to safety concerns.

“Any false assertion this individual was given preferential treatment is absurd. Prisoners are routinely moved in some instances due to significant safety and danger concerns,” the official said of Jeffrey Epstein’s accomplice.

In a statement earlier today responding to Maxwell’s move from a Florida facility to the one in Texas, the family of Virginia Giuffre, along with Maxwell and Epstein accusers Annie and Maria Farmer, said:

It is with horror and outrage that we object to the preferential treatment convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell has received.

California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, may call a special election in November to begin the process of redrawing the state’s congressional maps in response to Texas’s plans to change their own maps to help Republicans keep their majority in the House of Representatives.

Donald Trump is pushing Texas and other Republican-dominated states to carry out mid-decade redistricting that will favor the GOP and potentially stop Democrats from retaking control of the House in next year’s midterm elections. Governors in Democratic-led states have responded by warning they will move to redo their own maps if Texas goes ahead with its plans, which could create an additional five Republican-leaning districts.

California is viewed as the best opportunity for Democrats to pick up seats through gerrymandering, but voters will first have to approve changes to an independent redistricting commission that was given the power to draw congressional districts in 2010.

Speaking at a Thursday press conference, Newsom said “a special election would be called, likely to be the first week of November” to approve the changes.

“We will go to the people of this state in a transparent way and ask them to consider the new circumstances, to consider these new realities,” the governor added.

The party out of power typically regains control of the House in a president’s first midterm election, as the Republicans did under Biden in 2022 and Obama in 2010, and Democrats did during Trump’s first term in 2018.

Newsom argued that another two years of unified Republican control of Congress would be especially harmful for California, noting that Los Angeles residents were still waiting for lawmakers to approve aid from the wildfires that ravaged the region earlier this year.

“They’re doing a midterm rejection of objectivity and independence, an act that we could criticize from the sideline, or an act that we can respond to in kind – fight fire with fire,” Newsom said.

While Republicans could gain the most seats by redrawing Texas’s maps, Ohio, another red state, must also redraw its maps before next year’s election, and there’s talk of redistricting to the GOP’s advantage in Missouri and Indiana.

Democrats are seen as having a more difficult path to improving their odds of winning the House majority through redistricting, often due to their states’ embrace of independent commissions intended to draw fair congressional amps.

Voters created the California Citizens Redistricting Commission in 2008 to draw its legislative maps, and in 2010 expanded its powers to congressional districts. Newsom said, “We’re not here to eliminate the commission,” but rather to respond to what he described as “the rigging of the system by the president of the United States.

“And it won’t just happen in Texas. I imagine he’s making similar calls all across this country. It’s a big deal. I don’t think it gets much bigger,” Newsom said.

In the same Truth Social post, Trump said Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell should also be “put out to pasture”, as he continued to insist the US economy is booming on his watch.

The Economy is BOOMING under ‘TRUMP’ despite a Fed that also plays games, this time with Interest Rates, where they lowered them twice, and substantially, just before the Presidential Election, I assume in the hopes of getting ‘Kamala’ elected – How did that work out? Jerome ‘Too Late’ Powell should also be put ‘out to pasture’.

Donald Trump has said he’s ordered the firing of Erika McEntarfer, the commissioner of the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, hours after data showed US employment growth was weaker than expected for the last few months.

McEntarfer was nominated by former president Joe Biden to serve in the role in 2023 and was confirmed by the US Senate the following year.

In a Truth Social post, Trump suggested (with no evidence) McEntarfer had “faked” the employment figures in the run-up to last year’s election, in a bid to boost Kamala Harris’s chances of victory, and implied she “manipulated” the numbers for political reasons.

“We need accurate Jobs Numbers. I have directed my Team to fire this Biden Political Appointee, IMMEDIATELY. She will be replaced with someone much more competent and qualified,” Trump wrote.

“Important numbers like this must be fair and accurate, they can’t be manipulated for political purposes.”

The bureau released revised job stats today which showed the US economy added only 73,000 jobs in July, far lower than expected, amid ongoing concerns with Trump’s escalating trade war.

In the report, the BLS also slashed the number of jobs added in May, revising the figure down by 125,000, from 144,000 to only 19,000, and June, which was revised down by 133,000, from 147,000 to just 14,000 – a combined 258,000 fewer jobs than previously reported.

Donald Trump has said he had ordered two nuclear submarines to be positioned in “appropriate regions” in response to threats from former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev, who said on Thursday that Trump should remember Moscow had Soviet-era nuclear strike capabilities.

Trump said in a post on Truth Social:

Based on the highly provocative statements of the Former President of Russia, Dmitry Medvedev, who is now the Deputy Chairman of the Security Council of the Russian Federation, I have ordered two Nuclear Submarines to be positioned in the appropriate regions, just in case these foolish and inflammatory statements are more than just that. Words are very important, and can often lead to unintended consequences, I hope this will not be one of those instances. Thank you for your attention to this matter!

The Canadian team working on a trade deal with the US could walk away from talks in the wake of Donald Trump’s decision to impose a 35% tariff on some goods from Canada, an adviser to that country’s prime minister, Mark Carney, said on Friday.

Flavio Volpe, a member of Carney’s hand-picked Council on Canada-US Relations, told CBC News that the negotiators would stay in Washington for the time being. Yesterday, Trump signed an executive order increasing tariffs on Canadian goods to 35% from 25% on all products not covered by the US-Mexico-Canada trade agreement.

The White House cited what it said was Canada’s failure to stop fentanyl smuggling and a failure to address US concerns about trade barriers. Trump has also cited Carney’s plan to recognize a Palestinian state in September as making it “very hard” to reach a deal.

“Team Canada is still in Washington working on a deal and they’re going to be there until we either have a conclusion of a good deal for Canada or that it’s time to take a pause and walk away,” said Volpe, president of Canada’s national Automotive Parts Manufacturers’ Association.

Carney wants a new deal to reset bilateral relations, saying Trump’s move to impose tariffs had irrevocably upended the decades-old trading and security ties between the two neighbors. The talks though have so far produced little.

Washington is also unhappy about Canada’s refusal to drop its own Trudeau-era countermeasures.

In June, Carney had threatened to ramp up counter-tariffs in July unless there was progress on the deal. A statement he issued early today did not mention retaliation at all.

Brian Clow, a senior Trudeau aide who was in charge of US relations inside the prime minister’s office for several years, noted that Trump had announced a number of deals with nations that declined to impose counter-tariffs.

“Unfortunately, Canada stands on its own right now, along with China, because many other countries around the world refused to stand up to this President,” he told Reuters. “So I’m not sure that further retaliation is the way to go here.”

The offices of Carney and Dominic LeBlanc, the federal cabinet minister leading the Canadian team in Washington, were not immediately available for comment.

Kamala Harris has said that she currently has no desire to re-enter “the system” of American politics because it is “broken”.

Last night the Democratic party’s defeated presidential nominee, who replaced Joe Biden late in the 2024 campaign after he dropped his re-election bid, gave her first interview since losing the election to Donald Trump, talking to Stephen Colbert on The Late Show.

After she announced she will not run for the governorship of California just a day earlier, Harris told the TV show that it was about something more “basic” than whether she wanted to run for something else instead – with the subtext being whether she will attempt a White House run again in 2028.

“Recently I made the decision that I just – for now – I don’t want to go back in the system. I think it’s broken,” she said, provoking a collective groan from the studio audience. Colbert later returned to the subject, saying that her remark was harrowing. “Well, but it’s also evident, isn’t it?” she said.

The former vice-president added:

I always believed, that as fragile as our democracy is, our systems would be strong enough to defend our most fundamental principles. And I think right now that they’re not as strong as they need to be. And for now I don’t want to go back into that system.

Harris’s choice of The Late Show as the channel for her first post-election defeat interview was pointed. The most-watched talkshow was cancelled last month by the CBS network, which pleaded financial stress, though the decision was widely denounced as being politically motivated.

The cancellation was announced after Colbert had criticized CBS and its parent company, Paramount Global, for reaching a $16m settlement with Trump. The president had sued CBS News over an interview on the 60 Minutes show with Harris at the height of last year’s presidential campaign, which Trump claimed had been manipulated in her favour.

None of this febrile backstory was mentioned by either Colbert or Harris on Thursday. But she did delivery a passionate lament for the numbers of people who she said had “capitulated” to the aggressive second Trump administration.

When Colbert invited her to say “I told you so” after she had predicted many of Trump’s most contentious moves – including Medicaid cuts, ignoring court orders and “massive tax cuts to the rich” – she replied: “But Stephen, what I did not predict was the capitulation.”

She went on:

Perhaps it’s naive of me … There should be many who consider themselves to be guardians of our system and our democracy who just capitulated, and I didn’t see that coming.

Americans are struggling financially, grappling with debt and the rising cost of living, and are blaming the Trump administration and corporate interests for worsening economic outlooks for working families, according to a new poll.

Six out of 10 Americans place blame on the Trump administration for driving up their cost of living, according to a poll conducted by Morning Consult for the Century Foundation, which asked 2,007 Americans how they are managing the high cost of living in the US economy, who they think is to blame and what are the solutions.

The poll found 63% said Trump had had a negative impact on grocery prices, and 61% said he had had a negative impact on the cost of living. Nearly half, 49%, said the Trump administration had had a negative impact on their finances. Nearly eight out of 10 Americans, including 70% of Republicans, fear that Trump’s tariffs will increase the price of everyday goods.

More than six out of 10 Americans said it had become more difficult to find a well-paying job, buy a home and afford childcare.

Ghislaine Maxwell has been transferred from a Florida prison to a lower-security facility in Texas to continue serving her 20-year sentence, the US Bureau of Prisons said today.

For Maxwell, an associate of the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, the move from FCI Tallahassee, a low-security prison, to the federal prison camp in Bryan, Texas, comes a week after she met with deputy attorney general Todd Blanche, who said he wanted to speak with her about anyone else who may have been involved in Epstein’s crimes of trafficking underage girls. Maxwell’s lawyer David Markus confirmed that she was moved.

The reason for the move isn’t immediately clear yet, but Maxwell is appealing her conviction to the supreme court.

The Bureau of Prisons classifies prison camps such as Bryan as minimum-security institutions, the lowest of five security levels in the federal system. Such facilities have limited or no perimeter fencing. Low-security facilities such as FCI Tallahassee have double-fenced perimeters and higher staff-to-inmate ratios than camps, according to the bureau.

The House oversight committee has said that it also wants to speak with Maxwell. Markus said Maxwell would be open to this but only if the panel gives her immunity from prosecution for anything she says.

Further to my earlier post, Donald Trump has (yet again) called on top Federal Reserve officials to seize control from its chair, Jerome Powell, if he fails to cut interest rates, stepping up his extraordinary attacks on the central bank’s independence.

The US president called Powell “a stubborn MORON” in a series of critical social media posts on Friday, days after the Fed held rates steady for the fifth consecutive time.

It comes as Trump faces heightened questions over the impact of his aggressive economic policy, and the White House presses forward with plans for a fresh wave of tariffs next week.

Hours before the federal government released data which underlined a significant deterioration in the jobs market, Trump again broke with precedent to pin blame on the Fed – and urge it to change course.

“Jerome ‘Too Late’ Powell, a stubborn MORON, must substantially lower interest rates, NOW,” Trump wrote on Truth Social, his social network. “IF HE CONTINUES TO REFUSE, THE BOARD SHOULD ASSUME CONTROL, AND DO WHAT EVERYONE KNOWS HAS TO BE DONE!”

The Fed chair does not unilaterally set interest rates, which are decided by its rate-setting federal open market committee. Presidents typically respect its independence, leaving the central bank to make an objective decision – without political interference – about the best policy on interest rates for the US economy.

Democratic lawmakers have slammed Trump’s “reckless and chaotic” tariff policies and federal cuts after today’s weak jobs report revealed that 258,000 fewer jobs were created in May and June than previously thought.

Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer said on X:

The chickens are coming home to roost for Trump, and American families are paying the price. His reckless and chaotic tariffs and his drastic cuts are catching up with the economy which means fewer jobs and more people out of work. Trump must end his trade war and reverse his horrible cuts now.

California governor Gavin Newsom wrote:

A July jobs report way below expectations. May and June revised down as well. Unemployment rate ticked back up to 4.2%. We haven’t seen conditions like these since 2020. Don’t let Donald Trump gaslight you. He is failing Americans and crashing our economy.

Kathy Hochul, New York’s governor, said:

Donald Trump is killing jobs and jacking up prices with his tariffs. Sellout Stefanik calls his leadership a ‘masterclass.’ I call it bullshit. We will fight back.

Senator Chris Murphy, of Connecticut wrote:

Unsurprising bad jobs report. Just 73,000 added in July, and most of those were health care. Even worse, May and June jobs numbers revised down by 258,000. Awful. Companies don’t want to create jobs in Trump’s chaos economy with weakening rule of law and rampant corruption.

Representative Richard Neal, of Massachusetts, said:

The American people didn’t ask for this. Hiring has stalled, prices are surging, and this administration is actively undermining the labor market Democrats rebuilt. This goes beyond failed Republican leadership, it’s actively making life harder for people.

The main US stock indices have fallen sharply at the start of trading, as investors react to the flurry of tariffs announced last night and today’s weak US jobs report.

The Dow Jones industrial average (which contains 30 large US companies) has fallen by 1.1% at the start of trading, shedding 501 points to 43,629.

The broader S&P 500 index is down 1.2%, while the tech-focused Nasdaq has lost 1.5% – with Amazon falling almost 7% after issuing disappointing forecasts last night.

The Swiss government is disappointed by the US tariffs imposed on Switzerland, president Karin Keller-Sutter has said, with the shock 39% figure much higher than expected – and one of the highest rates for any country.

“The Federal Council is disappointed,” Keller-Sutter told Reuters on the sidelines of a Swiss national day event in Ruetli. “It is a pity that there is a tariff that is much higher than what we negotiated.”

Although the pharmaceuticals sector was not included in the tariffs, the increased duties would have a “very bad” effect on the Swiss economy, she said.

The government has already been in touch with Washington to find a solution, she added.

The White House said on Friday that Switzerland is facing a higher 39% tariff rate on its exports because it refused to make “meaningful concessions” by dropping trade barriers with the US.

“Switzerland, being one of the wealthiest, highest income countries on earth, cannot expect the United States to tolerate a one-sided trade relationship,” a White House official said.

Here’s more on Canadian prime minister Mark Carney’s comments from earlier, when he said Ottawa is “disappointed” by the US decision to raise tariffs to 35% on Canadian goods not covered under a pre-existing US-Mexico-Canada free trade agreement.

The US application of the USMCA treaty “means the US average tariff rate on Canadian goods remains one of its lowest for all of its trading partners”, Carney said.

“Other sectors of our economy – including lumber, steel, aluminium, and automobiles – are, however, heavily impacted by US duties and tariffs,” Carney said. “For such sectors, the Canadian government will act to protect Canadian jobs, invest in our industrial competitiveness, buy Canadian, and diversify our export markets.”

He also criticized Trump’s justification for raising the tariffs. “Canada accounts for only 1% of US fentanyl imports and has been working intensively to further reduce these volumes,” Carney said.

Trump has long complained about a “flood” of fentanyl” coming from the north. He also said earlier this week that it would be “very hard” to make a trade deal with Canada after Carney’s announcement that he plans to join other countries in recognizing a Palestinian state.

“Canada will be our own best customer,” Carney went on. “We can give ourselves more than any foreign government can ever take away by building with Canadian workers and by using Canadian resources to benefit all Canadians.”

Here’s Carney’s full statement:

Donald Trump has again repeated his plea for the Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell to cut interest rates.

Shortly after today’s weak jobs report was released, Trump posted on his Truth Social site:

Too Little, Too Late. Jerome “Too Late” Powell is a disaster. DROP THE RATE! The good news is that Tariffs are bringing Billions of Dollars into the USA!

The US dollar is being hammered on the foreign exchange markets, following the news that employment growth across America has been much weaker than previously thought over the last three months – a sign that the US labor market may be cooling.

The latest non-farm payroll, just released, shows that US employment rose by just 73,000 in July, rather weaker than the 110,000 new jobs expected.

But the big shock comes in the latest revisions to payrolls, with previous estimates for both May and June being revised sharply lower.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics now estimates that just 19,000 new jobs were created in May, 125,000 fewer than the 144,000 previously estimated.

June’s data has been revised down too - showing that just 14,000 new jobs were created, not the 147,000 reported a month ago.

That means 258,000 fewer jobs were created in May and June than previously thought.

The US unemployment rate has risen to 4.2% from 4.1% in June.

This surprisingly weak data may be a sign that Trump’s trade wars, and the associated uncertainty, have cause more damage to the US economy than previously thought. There could also be an impact from cost-cutting Doge program pushed by Elon Musk.

Donald Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff has visited Gaza today and been shown one of the controversial aid sites around which Israeli forces have killed hundreds of Palestinian people waiting for aid.

Witkoff, the US president’s special envoy for the Middle East, had earlier met with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu amid mounting international horror over starvation in Gaza that follows months of Israeli-imposed aid restrictions.

The visit to the site in Rafah by Witkoff – a former real estate lawyer with no foreign policy or humanitarian background, who has also met Vladimir Putin on Trump’s behalf – was reported by a number Israeli media organisations and comes as Human Rights Watch on Friday described the aid sites run by the Israeli and US-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation – as “death traps” that had become the scene of regular “bloodbaths”. The UN has said almost nine hundred Palestinians have been killed by Israeli forces attempting to reach the sites.

According to the White House, the visit by Witkoff, accompanied by the US ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, was aimed at finding ways to speed deliveries to Gaza. “The special envoy and the ambassador will brief the president immediately after their visit to approve a final plan for food and aid distribution into the region,” the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, told reporters.

Trump on Thursday called the situation in Gaza “a terrible thing” when asked about comments from his ally and Republican US representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, who became the first GOP lawmaker to call Israel’s assault on the Palestinian territory a genocide.

“Oh, it’s terrible what’s occurring there, yeah, it’s a terrible thing. People are very hungry,” Trump told reporters when asked about Greene’s social media comments, while also saying Washington had given financial assistance to address the hunger crisis in Gaza.

My colleagues have created a searchable table of the countries and the “reciprocal” tariffs they face.

The rates, which range from 41% for Syria to 10% for the UK, can be found in the table via the link below.

A quick summary.

Stock markets in Europe and across Asia-Pacific countries have fallen after Donald Trump announced new tariffs on dozens of US trading partners.

Last night, as the latest deadline to reach deals approached, Trump signed an executive order imposing tariffs ranging from 10% to 41%.

Rates were set at 25% for India, 20% for Taiwan and 30% for South Africa ahead of the US president’s self-imposed deadline of 1 August for striking trade deals with countries worldwide.

Trump also extended the deadline for a tariff agreement with Mexico by another 90 days.

Share prices have weakened in response – with Germany’s DAX down 1.9% and France’s CAC losing 2.2%, as European stock markets fell to a one-month low.

Asia-Pacific stock markets were on track for their worst week since April, with Japan’s Nikkei 225 losing 0.6%,

South Africa’s stock market is now down almost 1.5%.

Canada’s prime minister, Mark Carney, said he was disappointed that Donald Trump was raising its tariffs from 25% to 35%.

And there was shock in Switzerland, which has been lumbered with a 39% tariff rate – which manufacturers fear will lead to job losses.

You can follow more on our business live blog: