When President Donald Trump fired the Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Erika McEntarfer, after the agency released revised data showing U.S. hiring had drastically slowed in May and June, Trump claimed, without evidence, that the data had been manipulated “for political purposes.”
Trump said on Friday at the White House, “I believe the numbers were phony” and wrote on social media: “In my opinion, today’s Jobs Numbers were RIGGED in order to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad.””
Responding to Trump’s firing of McEntarfer on CNN, Rep. Jake Auchincloss (D-MA) said: “It’s something Xi Jinping in China or Kim Jong Un in North Korea or the Ayatollah in Iran would do — fire a government economist because the economist gives you bad news.”
Note: In September 2024, it was widely reported that a top Chinese economist working at a government think tank, Zhu Hengpeng, disappeared after criticizing Xi Jinping in a private chat. In 2021, Kim Jong Un fired a senior economic official he appointed a month prior claiming they failed to come up with new ideas to salvage an economy.
BREAKING: Democrat Jake Auchincloss just put on a masterclass for how to defeat Donald Trump’s lies about the economy. This is a must watch. pic.twitter.com/uayrj8UAPY
— Democratic Wins Media (@DemocraticWins) August 2, 2025
Auchincloss warned Americans that “the President is going to continue to try to lie to the American people about jobs, about the Federal Reserve, about his stewardship of the economy. One thing he’s not going to be able to lie about to the American people though is prices. Because the American people know prices,” he said, and “no, they’re not going down as he promised.”
Note: Auchincloss studied government and economics at Harvard University before he served in the U.S. Marine Corps and earned an MBA in finance from MIT’s Sloan School of Management.
Talking to the media on Sunday, National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett, a Trump appointee, supported the President’s decision to fire McEntarfer, claiming to have noticed a “partisan pattern” in the job data reporting.