Kristen Welker Makes White House Adviser Watch Clips of Trump Touting Jobs Numbers He Now Says Were ‘Faked’
Kristen Welker confronted National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett on Meet the Press over President Donald Trump’s firing of the top jobs data official this week.
On Friday, Trump fired Erika McEntarfer, the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, after the agency reported that the economy added just 73,000 jobs in July. The BLS also released downward revisions of jobs data from May and June, showing that the economy added 258,000 fewer jobs than initially reported. Trump baselessly insisted the numbers were wrong and accused McEntarfer of having “faked the Jobs Numbers” to hurt him politically.
But as Welker noted on Sunday, Trump had no issue touting the BLS numbers when they reported positive data.
“President Trump himself was happy to accept the jobs numbers issued under McEntarfer for his leadership when the numbers were good,” she told Hassett. “Take a listen to what he said in the past.”
“The numbers were much better, as you know, than projected by the media,” Trump said on March 7.
“In three months, we have created 350,000 jobs,” the president gushed in April. “Think of that.”
“A lot of jobs are being created,” he said in June, reacting to the May jobs report. “That’s what happened this morning.”
Welker then asked Hassett if Trump will fire government officials for reporting data he “disagrees with.”
“So, is the president prepared to fire anyone who reports data that he disagrees with?” the host inquired.
“No, absolutely not,” Hassett responded. “The president wants his own people there so that when we see the numbers, they’re more transparent and more reliable. And if there are big changes and big revisions, we expect more big revisions for the jobs data in September, for example, and we wanna know why, and we want people to explain it to us.”
Welker followed up by asking if Hassett has “hard evidence” that the latest numbers are wrong. Hassett responded simply by saying the May and June revisions are evidence in and of themselves.
“If you look at the number itself, it is the evidence,” he said.
Watch above via NBC.
