Republican Senator Tells Trump To ‘Grow Up’ After Furious Reaction to Bad Jobs Numbers
Republican Sens. Thom Tillis (R-NC) and Cynthia Lummis (R-WY) said they were troubled when President Donald Trump fired the nation’s chief jobs data official after some bad employment numbers came in.
Tillis, who declined to run for reelection next year, went so far as to tell Trump to “grow up.”
On Friday, the president fired Bureau of Labor Statistics Commissioner Erika McEntarfer after the agency said the economy added just 73,000 jobs in July. The BLS also released figures showing that the economy added 258,000 fewer jobs than initially reported. Trump baselessly claimed that the numbers were inaccurate and accused McEntarfer of having “faked the Jobs Numbers” to damage him politically.
During Meet the Press on Sunday, Kristen Welker aired snippets of senators from both parties reacting.
SEN. TILLIS: [She] was fired because the president or whoever decided to fire her, the director, because they didn’t like numbers? They oughta grow up.
SEN. LUMMIS: If the president is firing statisticians because he doesn’t like the numbers – but they are accurate – then that’s a problem.
SEN. BERNIE SANDERS: It is the sign of an authoritarian type that when you get information you don’t like, rather than deal with the issue, you fire the people who gave you the bad news.
SEN. CHUCK SCHUMER: It’s classic Donald Trump. When he gets the news he doesn’t like, he shoots the messenger.
Elsewhere on the Sunday shows, William Beach, a former BLS commissioner appointed by Trump in 2019, told CNN’s State of the Union that “there’s no way” commissioners can fake the numbers.
“The commissioner doesn’t do anything to collect the numbers,” he explained. “The commissioner doesn’t see the numbers until Wednesday before they’re published. By the time the commissioner sees the numbers, they’re all prepared. They’re locked into the computer system. The only thing the commissioner does on Wednesday is to kind of do the edits on the text.”
Watch above via NBC.
