Bulwark Takes - The Jobs Report Trump Doesn’t Want You to See

Episode Date: November 7, 2025

Sarah Longwell and JVL take on Donald Trump’s hidden unemployment crisis—the million jobs lost, the vanishing economic data, and the chaos of his tariff-driven “businessman” presidency.

Hello, everyone. There is a private company putting out unemployment reports this week because that's not something the United States government does anymore because it's bad news. And there can be no bad news in Donald Trump's government. According to the firm, Challenger, Gray and Christmas, happy Christmas. U.S.-based employers announced 153,074 job cuts in October, up 175% from a year prior to that when Joe Biden was president. Sarah, is that good? I'm pretty sure it's bad. Another nugget that's in there is it is 1.1 million jobs lost in total this year. So since Donald Trump took office, we have experienced a net decline of over a million jobs. That is bad. That's bad. I mean, it's a good thing he doesn't have a Department of Bureau of Labor statistics to put out numbers on these things anymore.

It is, yeah. That would be horrible. You know, private sector to the rescue. We are still getting our unemployment numbers, and they're terrible. And I got to say, this is one of those things. So obviously, this has bigger economic implications. I'm not an economist. And so, you know, and you sometimes are very good at, you know, playing one of these on a podcast.

Like, you're great at that. So maybe you can tell us what this contraction means in terms of our eventual slide into recession territory or stagflation territory because inflation remains high. I think the big takeaway for me, though, is Donald Trump is spending his time building gilded ballrooms with the private funds of his rich friends, literally gilded, of his rich friends who he is making richer every day through the kleptocracy that he is running with the American government. Everybody in immediate proximity to Trump is getting richer, while the vast majority of Americans are getting poorer and people are losing. losing their jobs. And the cutbacks are coming in part, like we're seeing all these firms, companies like Target, UPS, other places announcing massive job losses or layoffs that they're going to be doing. And many of these are the worst since either 2003 or 2009, if you remember 2009, which was quite a bad year for the economy. And so it looks like we are headed in that

direction. And this is why you've seen Donald Trump's numbers for the first time are really starting to fall. And I think it is because the actual pain is starting to hit people. So I want to read from the Challenger Gray Christmas report. Some industries are correcting after the hiring boom of the pandemic, but this comes as AI adoption, softening consumer and corporate spending. I want to underline that. And rising costs drive belt tightening and hiring freezes.

Those laid off now are finding it. harder to quickly secure new roles, which could further loosen the labor market. So again, on what we're seeing here is, this suggests that overall unemployment rate is actually going up. It isn't just churn. It isn't just people leaving one job for another. Time on unemployment is now increasing. And what that is going to do is it's going to lower wages, right?

Supply and demand when there are more people seeking jobs than there are, than they're than there are jobs. The employers can pay less for them. And then on top of all of this, you have the push and pull that the Fed is going to have. They cut rates recently. They're going to want to cut rates again if the economy is slowing like this, except that inflation is also persistent. So inflation is, it's not terrible right now, but it is a tick above where people want it to be. and having inflation running slightly hotter than it should be while the economy is cooling rapidly. No, bueno. No, bueno.

No, bueno. And I got to say, Sarah, maybe you could under explain it to me, but I don't understand how this could be happening because Donald Trump was a businessman on TV once. So he understands business. Yeah, he fired Gilbert Godfrey on a soundstage and he promised to lower grocery prices. which is what he was hired to do. I actually think one of the things that's really important about what's in these jobs reports is that the – and I thought this is where you were going when you said you wanted to underline that particular part of it in terms of the belt tightening of corporate America. A lot of that – that's the tariffs. The thing to understand is that, look, people were upset about the economy going in to the 2024 election.

And what Joe Biden had done was stage a recovery from the bottom dropping out during COVID, right? And where we had to do all the stimulus activity. And so he, but this was the thing is like on paper, he was doing like the hard work of digging us out. But of course, people were still feeling pain. And so they hired Donald Trump, not everybody, but lots of people hired Donald Trump because of prices. I think that prices had a lot to do in the fact that nothing is going well with them, had a lot to do with why Donald Trump was just resoundingly delivered defeat. I think it was Trump.

I mean, I think he was a big drag that led Democrats to just crush in these off-year elections. But Donald Trump has done nothing to improve the economy. The economy has not, economy has gotten worse, like to the extent Biden was going like this, going like this, and then Trump like this, especially in the manufacturing sector. But I just, I could go on about tariffs for a while and what it's doing. No, but Trump has done exactly the opposite, right? If Trump had simply gone golfing, economy would be fine. We are in a man-made disaster.

And this is, it's everything. It is the tariffs. It's not just the tariffs, but the way in which the tariffs have been implemented, where it's on again, off again, it's capricious, nobody knows. Like, it isn't just tariffs that everybody can then adjust to. it is chaos, which freezes people, right? If it was just, if he even just did a straightforward trade war, we're like, we're going to punish the people who are importing to America,

we're going to put a lot of tariffs on it, everybody else figured it out, then it would be a drag on the economy, and it would be an increased input of inefficiency, but people could make plans around it. Instead, we have economic paralysis because nobody knows what to do. Because the thing that is today, well, If Donald Trump sees a commercial during the World Series that he doesn't like tomorrow, he's going to change the tariff rate.

And like, how can you plan for that if you're a business, right? That's right. And the other thing you see that has happened is this word, again, it said softening consumer spending. Why is consumer spending softening? Because consumer confidence is in the toilet. Like, if you just, again, look at all the consumer confidence surveys. And it's very, very bad. People think, like, oh, this isn't going well.

So here's my question. So the Supreme Court heard the Trump tariff. oral arguments, I think that the general consensus seems to be that they're going to save Trump from himself. And they're going to say, no, he can't do that. At which point Trump will either have to declare victory and say, see, it worked. We got everything we wanted. We got all the best deals. Won't make any sense. But that doesn't mean he can't do it. Or he could go to Congress and try to make the Republican Congress approve his tariffs legislatively. That's more likely to happen if he kills the filibuster. No, I was just going to say, this is one of the reasons I have become

pro-nooking the filibuster after all this time, in part because Congress has to be in the position to do this. The filibuster has made Congress, along with Trump, right, has made it so that Congress is dysfunctional. They cannot do anything. And so everything ends up in the hands of executive power. And this is where I finally start to move on the filibuster, because it has to balance two of my more conservative instincts, right? One of my conservative instincts is that I think that it's good to have these mechanisms and institutions of compromise, except nobody's compromising. It is not doing that. It is simply the actual thing that is accomplishing is total paralysis of Congress. My other conservative instinct is to hate too much power in the hands of the executive, right?

We have a system of checks and balances. That is very important to American liberal democracy. it is our Madisonian vision for how the government operates. Right now, we do not have a Congress. It's just not there. It's literally not there. Go ahead. The House is out of discussion. Let's get rid of the filibuster, make Trump go to Congress.

And then the Senate and Congress have to give him his tariffs. And then they won't be insulated from the electoral repercussions that come with that. And I think this is important. I think we talked about this a lot at the beginning of the term, which sort of the touch the stove nature of what has to happen. And I think, look, touch it. Nobody, touch it want, I don't want people to experience economic pain. But they voted. They voted for an outcome. I didn't mean that. Yeah. They voted for this outcome. And so, okay, like, Democrats or, like, people shouldn't save them from it. And, and Senate and congressional Republicans should not be

inoculated from the electoral consequences of doing it. And so I want Trump to nuke the filibuster, and I want Republicans to have to grapple decisively with the tariffs. I mean, we'll just say that even with the filibuster, Joe Biden was able to pass a lot of bipartisan legislation. He like passed a full legalization of gay marriage, passed a really common sense gun reform bill, passed a big infrastructure package that shoveled money into red states to help to help the forgotten men and women of America. I mean, some people can do compromise. Not these particular people.

That's okay. All right. Sarah, I guess this is a process question. So I'll just let think if you want to talk about it, you can if not. Is it a problem that we now exist in a country where not only is the rule of law basically just a guideline, right? you know, like Jim Comey can get indicted, but everybody else is allowed to do whatever they want. But we also have a government that you can't trust the basic data, right? The government has simply stopped publishing data that it doesn't like, which is what they do in China, right?

And I know this from like demographics world back when I used to pay attention to demographics. And you would, you know, you would always be very, very wary about demographic data coming out of China. China and the people who study this stuff seriously would get most of their understanding what was going on from China by talking to Chinese researchers at international conferences where they could have like conversations at a bar and be told what the actual numbers were saying because, you know, you just can't publish numbers that the regime doesn't like. Isn't this long term a gigantic problem for America? Because you can't just go back, right?

Like, okay, so Donald Trump loses and then you get some. replacement-level Democrat as president again, and everyone says, well, now you can trust government data. But if 40,000 voters in Wisconsin go the other way next time around, then we have to stop trusting government. Like, how does that work? I will say, of all, there are a lot of this question of what do we do post-Trump is sort of, is a sticky one across so many different vectors. On this one, though, like the problem of long-term, trust, that one's really hard. Like, that's, you know, you can, you build trust over decades.

You can lose it in minutes. That's right. Our economy, specifically in the global, from the global standpoint, people, you know, using the dollar is there, the currency that they, that they measure them, that they uses the measurement tool. Like, all of those things are compromised by Donald Trump. I do think they can start publishing the numbers again, though. I mean, everybody knows that the problem is not that people don't trust the numbers right

now is that Donald Trump just took the numbers away so that people couldn't see them. And that's something I think that they can re-institute. We'll see once they start publishing numbers again, if they're trustworthy. Yeah, that's a good point. I guess we'll see. We'll see whether or not they start publishing the numbers. The good news is, just like we're getting economic numbers out of the private sector, like unlike the Chinese regime where no company would step up and say there's no private

sector data that would come out and contravene what the regime was saying. That is still not true in America. In America, there is still an enormous appetite for the actual information, and people will provide it. Private sector, they will provide it. And so we will know, the other thing is that you can not tell people, but this is one of those things where people are going to feel it. They are feeling it. Can I ask you something, though? Yeah.

One of the things that they point to as a reason for the jobs, softening numbers, is AI. And it's amazing to me how little Trump and this administration talk about AI. Like, it is coming at us like a thunderbolt to our system that is going to impact us in so many different ways. And it's not just that they don't have a plan for out of deal with it or anything like that. It's just not even talking about it, about the fact that from an economic standpoint, forget the information environment. But from an economic standpoint, a lot of jobs that used to exist, compiling data or reading legal briefs, like, a lot of them are white-collar jobs that used to be in research. They're just getting replaced by AI. And to your point earlier, those are not going somewhere else, right?

They're just disappearing. And so I do think that Democrats have an opportunity to be forward-looking, to feel like they are on top of the future, by starting to have a plan. for what they're going to do to build an economy when AI is going to, like, just swallow tons of jobs. Like, and it's not an easy thing, but this is where my hire a million teachers, hire a million nurses, we're going to hire a million social, you know, social workers. Like, these are a plan where we are going to build out sectors of the economy where things have been shrinking, where AI is not going to steal the jobs, like AI is not going to take them.

And we need to invest in in building those sectors. We need to invest in educating people for the new environment where AI can do these things. And like somebody with a plan for that, I think can go far. My plan. We send chat GPT on a falcon heavy into the sun. It's not going to happen. That's the thing. Can we kill AI and social media together at the same time?

Like a red wedding of the tech universe? No? No. Can't do that. All right. I'm JVL. She's my best friend, Sarah Longwell. Come follow us at the bulwark and do us a quick solid. Hit like, hit subscribe. We'll be back next time. Bye.

Look, America.