Trump invites Project 2025 author to present economic data after jobs report showing rising Black unemployment

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The president attempted to tell a different story about the U.S. economy than what the latest job report revealed.

President Donald Trump sought to demonstrate a robust U.S. economy at the White House on Thursday after last month’s labor report revealed a slowdown in job creation and the highest Black unemployment rate since the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.

As reporters were lined up outside the White House to attend a scheduled East Room ceremony commemorating National Purple Heart Day, the White House pool was unexpectedly rushed into the Oval Office. Inside, Trump was joined by Stephen Moore, an economist from the conservative think-tank, The Heritage Foundation.

The president, who last week fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics after accusing her of faking the dismal July jobs report, facilitated a “quick session” with Moore, who provided new economic data “put together” by the conservative Heritage Foundation fellow that “no one has ever seen.”

“We have access to some data that no one else does on what has happened month by month with median household income,” said Moore, who claimed the data he presented was based on “unpublished” data from the Census Bureau.

Moore, who co-authored Project 2025 and the book “Trumponomics,” described the data as “good news.”

The economist shared that he reached out to Trump after the president fired Erika McEntarfer as commissioner of the U.S. Department of Labor Statistics. Moore’s newly presented data proved it, he insisted.

“This shows that over the last two years of the Biden administration, the BLS overestimated job creation by 1.5 million jobs. That’s a gigantic error,” said Moore.

Trump interjected that he believed the Biden White House did it “purposely.”

Moore continued, “If it wasn’t purposefully, it’s incompetence.”

In an attempt to tell a different story about the U.S. economy than what the latest job report revealed—which showed only 73,000 jobs were added and the Black unemployment rate climbed to 7.2%—Moore said that during Trump’s first five months in office, the average median household income adjusted for inflation was up to $1,174.

Looking back at 2020, Moore said Trump’s first term saw the average family’s real income increase by $6,400, adjusted for inflation. By contrast, he said President Joe Biden‘s first term saw only a “measly” $551. Moore’s data, which was presented with giant charts, cannot be easily verified given his claimed source of unreleased Census data.

It was perhaps unusual for a president to bring in an outside economist rather than an administration official, such as a member of the White House Council of Economic Advisors or National Economic Council, to reveal such federal economic data to reporters.

Angela Hanks, a former Biden Labor Department official, told theGrio that President Trump and Moore seemed to be “conflating revisions” of labor data, which she explained is a “normal process of collecting monthly labor market data.”

Hanks, chief of policy programs at The Century Foundation, said there is “inaccuracy in [Moore’s] numbers overall.”

“It is not accurate to say that revisions mean that the data collection is sloppy or misleading, or even deliberately falsified,” said Hanks, responding to Moore’s claims about the Biden administration’s economic data.

She continued, “The reality is the BLS issues revisions because as time goes on, they get additional employer survey data, which helps add to their analysis of the job market. So you could even say that the fact that they do revisions at all is a sign of rigorous data collection and analysis.”

Hanks said she’s unsure of what Census data Moore referred to, telling theGrio, “especially if he is saying that it’s not yet released.” She added, “I’m not totally sure how he would even have access to it.”

Ultimately, Hanks said, Moore and Trump are attempting to “back into an explanation” for McEntarfer’s seemingly impulsive firing simply because “the president was unhappy with the numbers.”

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