If Trump thought he could neuter the Jeffrey Epstein scandal this week, he received an even worse present on the doorstep of the White House on Friday: a weak jobs report.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported a triple barrel of bad news in its jobs report: First, it showed that the unemployment rate ticked up to 4.3 percent. Second, the number showed that the U.S. economy added only 22,000 jobs, far below market expectations. Third, downward revisions from the June jobs report showed that for the first time since 2020, the U.S. economy had lost jobs, in this case losing 13,000 jobs.
