MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough didn’t mince words Monday as he tore into Donald Trump’s excuse for firing the top U.S. labor stats official.
Trump axed Erika McEntarfer, the commissioner of labor statistics, just hours after the government released a weak jobs report showing the economy had slowed sharply. His reasoning? He claimed McEntarfer, a Biden pick, was cooking the books before the 2024 election to make the economy look better — and that the truth only came out after the votes were in.
Scarborough wasn’t buying it.
“The more he talks about it, the more he just proves how wrong it was to fire this woman,” the Morning Joe host said.
Scarborough pointed out that Trump had no problem with McEntarfer’s numbers before — when they looked good.
“First of all, he just said all the numbers leading up to this report were positive. He always praised her numbers,” Scarborough noted. “If he’s going to blame this on her instead of actually data, it wasn’t her.”
Scarborough also fact-checked Trump’s favorite line — that a supposedly “blockbuster” jobs report came out right before the election to help Biden.
“He keeps going back to this, this line about, ‘Oh, they put out a blockbuster report right before the election’ – no, they didn’t,” Scarborough said. “That’s just not true. I mean, from the reports I saw, it was actually tepid and weak right before the election.”
He didn’t stop there.
“I know facts don’t matter in this case,” he added. “But… fluctuations happen. That has always happened. It always will happen.”
Scarborough explained that jobs numbers get revised regularly — not for political reasons, but because not all employers report their data right away. Once more information comes in, the numbers get updated.
“The numbers are revised not because of any political bias,” Scarborough said, “but because of employers not participating as much and it taking another month to get more details… So, again, on all of these points, they just don’t hold any water.”
Watch the video below from MSNBC:
