Kevin O’Leary Criticizes Trump for Canning Jobs Data Official: ‘You Don’t Shoot the Messenger’

Kevin O’Leary, the chairman of O’Leary Ventures, joined Friday’s edition of CNN’s The Arena with Kasie Hunt to make clear that he disapproved of President Donald Trump’s decision to “whack” the Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, saying, “You don’t shoot the messenger.”

Earlier Friday, Trump baselessly accused Dr. Erika McTarfer of “faking” the job numbers, after a recently published July report showed the weakest job growth in a month since December 2020 and substantial downward revisions in the number of jobs added in May and June.

On Thursday, O’Leary appeared on CNN to argue that the Trump administration’s policies had been beneficial to him as an investor, yet Friday, he admitted that firing McTarfer “makes no sense whatsoever.”

Read a transcript of Kasie Hunt and O’Leary’s conversation below and watch above via CNN.

KASIE HUNT: Yesterday, you were here arguing that this mattered to you as an investor, and that the policy had been good for you as an investor. We started the show showing that if you’re an investor, the policy actually, today, did not seem to serve you very well. There are some questions here about these job reports, and the policy that the president is untertaking here. What say you today?

KEVIN O’LEARY: I don’t look at one day’s trading and decide I’m going to change my strategy. I want markets to correct. I want them to go up and down. We’re used to volatility. We had a bad print on jobs. I did not agree with whacking the commissioner. I don’t like that. Whacking statisticians makes no sense whatsoever. You don’t shoot the messenger. They used to do that in Ancient Rome. Bad news. They’d kill a guy off a horse. You don’t need to do that now. It doesn’t matter. This is a job where you just print data. So I didn’t like that story.

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