Bulwark Takes - Trump’s WORST Jobs Report Yet, Stagflation Incoming?

Episode Date: September 5, 2025

Tim Miller and Jonathan V. Last break down the latest disastrous jobs report and what it reveals about the state of the U.S. economy under Trump. From manufacturing losses to collapsing construction starts, they explain why the numbers are worse than they look, and how policy choices like tariffs, mass deportations, and federal cuts are fueling the downturn. They also discuss whether Trump could weaponize the Fed, the risks of stagflation, and why America may be speed-running toward an Argentina-style collapse. Check out the article here

Hey, everybody, Tim Miller from the Bullwark here with my colleague JVL, author of the Triad newsletter, which you absolutely have to sign up for at the bulwark.com. It's the best daily newsletter going. And he wrote today on the disastrous jobs report coming out of the government. I talked about this a little bit on the pod with David French, but JVL's newsletter is so withering about the state of our economy and who's suffering that I felt like we needed to dig a little deeper. Just a level set for people who haven't seen it.

BLS. Now, remember, we had fired Trump. Trump had fired Erica McIntarfer, who was the head of labor statistics last month and replaced her with this toady freak show who was there on January 6th. But that guy hasn't been confirmed yet. So we have kind of temporary deep state people here. Well, there's been some news on him, Tim. Did you see this? Yeah, he has a Twitter feed named after the vice president for segregationist, George

Wallace. Is that right? Yeah. He's a shit poster. Got it. You definitely want a shit poster in charge of something like labor statistics. Okay. You know, there's a place, there's a time and a place for shit posting. Their roles for chip posters.

Podcast host, maybe. For example, Commissioner of Labor statistics, not as much. Anyway. Director of FBI is a shit poster. That's true. That's great point. So anyway, they put out this report. We'll see if anybody gets fired because of it.

In short, the only 22,000 new jobs last month. They revised some of the previous months, which is funny because the months that Erica is fired over, whoever is doing it now, revise those down. They were actually worse than she said. And in June, the economy lost jobs, according to BLS. And, you know, manufacturing jobs down 78,000. So at the biggest picture, we're looking at a pretty stagnant economy. And I want to get into some of the details.

But JVIL, what was your top line takeaway? Yeah, it's very bad. And so it isn't just a one-month thing. We've been trending down this way since January of 2025. It's hard to say what happened in January. What did it happen in January? But we've been moving downwards and jobs. I was depressed, I remember.

Pretty consistently ever since. And this, again, the trends are bad. This time we missed expectations by a lot. And I was respecting 75,000 jobs added. We only got 22,000. We revised down what were already very bad jobs reports from June and July. July was revised up by just a couple, but June was revised down to its net negative. The total for the two months was down like 23,000 jobs.

And when you look at it now, healthcare added 31,000 jobs in August. We were net 22,000. Tim, that means that the rest of the country lost jobs. So if you don't work in health care, there's a chance that in your sector, there are fewer jobs today than there were on August 1st. And I mean, I guess we have some good news, though, because if I go by what I heard at the RFK hearing yesterday, we're going to have a lot more sick people in America. And so that's going to increase demand for health care services. And so maybe we can push those job numbers up in the coming months. That is great news.

And also, you know, something that's not in this report is you have to think about the big influx of hiring. at ice and we're going to have to staff the prison camps where we're keeping the migrants. So if you're a prison guard or you're a former actor who decides that they want to moonlight tackling people just trying to do their jobs, you know, lawnmowing or whatever, then that could be an opportunity. Yeah, we have some growth sectors, Tim. Yeah, yeah. So the people that are serving the measles patients, you know, private prisons and ice.

You know, and ice. And nice. There you go. It's a, we could rebound a little. When you look at, I mean, I'm obviously, I'm joking. But when you look at the date, it's very bad. Like the deeper you go into it, the worse it looks. The quits numbers, which are the quit.

When the quit rate is high, that means that workers. You're saying quit, right? Like people quitting their job. People quitting their job, right? And so when that number is high, that's actually a sign of health because it means that people think they can get better paying jobs. That has been stagnant for three or four months now. This is a sign that, like, at the actual grassroots level of workers, people are feeling very anxious.

And so this is a good, it's a good measure of not only like the actual state of the jobs market, but also of consumer sentiment and worker sentiment. We are seeing B of A just put out a chart today on looking at construction starts and construction spending, and that has sort of fallen off a cliff. This is an excellent, excellent predictor of recessions. It's just an early indicator. And I don't know. Like, how could anybody possibly have predicted that a guy who came into office promising

to institute an economy-wide disrupting regime of tariffs during a time of tremendous economic expansion during which the American economy was the envy of the world and promising to increase government debt massively? How could anyone possibly have known that it would end this way, Tim? I'd throw a couple more things on top of that, what he promised to do. massive cuts in federal worker hiring. So, like, we unemployed a bunch of federal workers. And that's not even in here, by the way.

A lot of those folks, they're severance. You know, Elon gave them, remember the deal? It feels like years ago that was early this year the Doge happened. But those expire in September. So there'll be another category of people, federal workers, who become unemployed for anyone who haven't found alternative jobs officially at the next month's report. And then so cut a lot of.

federal workers and then we expelled a lot of people from the country you know I don't I don't know if you're aware of this but the migrants that are in the country that we're expelling they also are consumers oh right I know really interesting yeah and we scared

foreign people from coming to the country because they don't want to get hassled at the airports they don't want to accidentally get sent to El Salvador so tourist money is down so yeah I mean I think and that was all again and I guess not scaring tourists way, but all of the rest of it were his stated plans for the economy. Yeah. This was, this was the plan.

And again, it isn't a, this isn't like, oh, he really hid the football. This is, and it also isn't the case that he was campaigning in the midst of the dust bowl. Like, I, I just can't overstate this. This makes our friend Sarah very, very angry with me. But the American economy from 2021 to the end of 2024 was unbelievably good. The unemployment rate was at or below 4% for something like 37 straight months. We had like 12 months of inflation, which was bad inflation, but not like historically bad inflation.

It was not in 1970s. It was not the Weimar Republic. And the Fed acted like with real alacrity. And by the time we got towards like summer of 2024, that had all been tamed to a degree where real wages were all had already leapfrogged the inflation costs. So like everything was good. Everything was really, really good.

For people who don't believe you, look at the boat index. For visual learners, for people who don't believe you, graphic design is your passion. You get a couple charts. I'm going to pull up here. We got the chart here. This is month over month employment change.

You can see if you look at the Biden arrows, those bars are high. Number go up. People were hiring. Number go up. And then on the Trump ones, you can see those arrows, those bars are wee little, kind of like little penises. Number go down.

Yeah, little micropenuses. And then, you'll leave the unemployment rate as well, a little less dramatic. But you can see where Trump comes in and how it starts to come up. I want to focus on a couple of sectors in particular that have been hurt by the tariffs. I've been some chatter out there. My husband does food policy. So I get, he sends me, you know, updates from the ag reports and stuff. A lot of concerns out there among the.

farmers the soybean exports numbers really bad and this also happened the first um trump administration but trump bailed them all out with a huge cash infusion just paid them yeah unclear whether that'll be possible this time i mean the cash a future was so huge i don't want to understate it the cash the farmer bailout in trump's first term was bigger than a the one-year operating cost to the department of state so it was not nothing um and um yeah so do you have any thoughts on that. And then also the tariffs are hitting some other kind of heartland companies, John Deere, we've got some bad, bad numbers out from. I'd like to hear you riff on that. Yeah. So, I mean, my, this is the real question. Like, and the $64,000 question is,

will Trump be able to loot the government to such a degree that he can make his people whole and only try to focus the effects of economic recession on the people who are his enemies? And I think most people assume that that's not. possible. The world is too big. It's too interconnected that, you know, you push in the economy over here and something pops out over there. And I think that's probably right. But we have seen him do the same thing with the immigration enforcement, right? It isn't Texas, right? The Texas housing industry is not having all of their construction workers rounded up because that would drive up housing costs and be very difficult for Greg Abbott to explain. Instead,

It's like, yeah, we're going to go into D.C. and New York and Chicago, we're going to really mess up those blue states. It's an instructive example, though, because even in that area where he has more control, and like the economy's complicated, there's not a good economy button. You know, it's like you can press the button and be like Louisiana, good, California, bad, you know, there's things you can do. There are levers you can pull. But even in that way, it's more direct because you can instruct ICE where to go, right? You can have Christy Nome instruct them where to go. Like that part, like there's elements that are out of there. control, right? I mean, in Florida,

Ron DeSantis doesn't want to look like a bitch, you know, and so there have been raids in the Cuban community in Florida that have created some backlash, right? Like here in Louisiana, there was a story of the day where like one of the Trump's biggest donors companies got rated. And so, again, at scale, not

as much, right? But you know, it's hard to really, you know, it's hard. And these guys aren't exactly firing on all cylinders. Right. And this is why I think the more likely course of action is that he's going to try to take over the Fed. And so what Trump is likely to think that he wants to do is just run the economy really, really hot. And so French said the same exact thing today. Not

not about taking over the Fed, but that's what he designed. That's what he would like to do if he could figure it up. So the Fed meets next week. They are likely to announce we think it's going to be like a 25 basis point in cut. Maybe 50 after the numbers today. Some of those econ nerds are saying maybe even up to 50. It's possible it could be 50, but the problem is that like inflation is already lurking and people expect because the pursuit, right now the producer price index is like way out of whack with the consumer price index as companies are just trying to eat costs and hold on a market share. But they can't do that indefinitely. And so people think there's a lot of inflation just sort of in the system that hasn't come out yet. If that happens and they wind up doing the rate cuts,

then, you know, maybe you solve one problem, but you create another because we really have a stagflation. That's what's happening. You know, good on you, Donald Trump, for creating stagflation. That's kind of hard to do. So I think the most likely thing is he, you know, he's trying to get rid of Lisa Cook. If he succeeds in that, then he can wait out Jerome Powell, whose term ends, or maybe force Powell out too.

Why not? Put his own people into the Fed and have the Fed become just another arm of his. in the way that the Department of Justice and the FBI now are simply arms of the Trump White House. They don't function with any independence whatsoever. And if you can do that, then you can just cut rates or you can go back to ZERP and just watch the money machine go, right?

And that work, you could probably do that for a year or three before you become Argentina. Right. And it wouldn't help housing insurance. And there's certainly like people with long lead kind of interest rates. That wouldn't help that much. But no, no, there's any like, Now, would it help farmers? Well, not really. But, but you could help a lot of people in that way because what you're doing is like setting the entire economy on fire. Right. And that, I mean, you do that. If the central bank in America is no longer independent, I mean, that is a like, hey, maybe the dollars in the world's reserve currency anymore 10 years from now. Like that, again, that's like a, I keep saying like we're already at four alarm fires, but that's like another four alarms to throw on the fire. I mean, it's a.

It's a NATO on fire. I love this. This is why I love talking to you about things like this, JVL, because you can have a update for people about how catastrophically bad the narrow one-month report is on jobs and have that be accurate and important update for people to get. Not everywhere can you get that update and then add on top of that some catastrophizing about how that terrible one-month report might lead to America speed running the Argentina

currency collapse. And that's what you come to JVL for. You know, I'm here to look over the horizon. for you, Tim. All right. Jonathan V. Last, sign up for that newsletter. Subscribe to this feed.

Tell your friends. We'll see you all soon. Bye.