Even Fox News couldn’t sugarcoat this one.
On Friday morning, during a live segment of “Mornings With Maria” on Fox Business, the network’s panel reacted in real-time to August’s jobs report—and for once, the tone was anything but upbeat. Despite the usual attempts to spin negative news into something, anything, vaguely positive for Donald Trump, this report forced even Fox to call it like it is.
U.S. employers added just 22,000 jobs in August. That’s not a typo. Economists had expected around 76,000. The real number came in not just short—but embarrassingly short.
And the bad news didn’t stop there.
The unemployment rate ticked up to 4.3%, higher than July’s 4.2%. That’s the highest it’s been since 2021, when the country was still crawling out of a pandemic-induced economic hole.
“So that would be higher than July’s 4.2%,” said Fox Business correspondent Lauren Simonetti, reading the numbers moments after they dropped.
But the real gut punch came with the revisions. Turns out, June’s job numbers were worse than previously reported. Much worse. According to the updated data, the economy actually lost 13,000 jobs that month.
Cheryl Casone, filling in as anchor, didn’t mince words. “That 22,000 number … it’s a weaker than expected number,” she said. “And these revisions are pretty brutal.”
Charles Payne chimed in with blunt agreement: “Yeah, extraordinarily.”
As the panel tried to make sense of the wreckage, the language got increasingly grim. Words like “surprising,” “disappointing,” and “there’s a lot of concern” were tossed around—hardly the kind of message Fox usually wants to send about Trump’s economy.
This all comes just weeks after Donald Trump fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, lashing out over another underwhelming jobs report. He accused the now-former BLS chief—without any evidence—of manipulating the numbers to make him look bad compared to Joe Biden. In her place, Trump installed a loyalist.
And yet, even under a hand-picked replacement, the numbers are worse.
Apparently aware of how bad the optics are, Trump tried to spin the data in the most Trumpian way possible: by pretending it doesn’t matter.
“The real numbers that I’m talking about are going to be whatever it is, but will be in a year from now,’’ he told reporters Thursday night at a private dinner with tech executives, according to the Associated Press.
Whatever it is?
It’s clear the numbers are bad—and no amount of deflection, scapegoating, or loyalist staffing seems to be changing that.
And when even Fox News—Trump’s usual safe space—is calling the numbers “brutal,” you know things are off the rails.
Watch the clip below:
DUN DUN DUN — Fox Business announces that the 22,000 jobs added in August are "much less than the expectation of 75,000" and that they June and July numbers were revised down as well pic.twitter.com/lVxz9LfZzQ
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 5, 2025
