In a wild and lie-filled CNBC interview Tuesday, President Donald Trump made so many false claims that even the usually composed host, Joe Kernen, pushed back — hard. From jobs numbers to gas prices to trade deals, Trump spun a version of reality that left critics stunned.
Right at the start, Kernen challenged Trump’s baseless claim that the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) “rigged” job numbers against him and hid bad news to help President Biden. Trump insisted that BLS waited until after the 2024 election to release downward revisions in jobs data — but that’s just false.
“The BLS announcement on November 1 [2024] showed weak growth of 12,000 jobs in October and downward revisions to August/September of 112,000,” wrote Matt Gertz, senior fellow at Media Matters. “Then after the election, the October figure was revised upward. Impossible to tell if Trump is lying, dumb, or sundowning.”
Nick Timiraos, chief economics correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, backed that up: Trump was “getting his dates wrong.”
Trump didn’t stop there. He claimed gas had dropped to $2.20 a gallon — a number that made Kernen visibly flinch. “I haven’t seen anything lower than $2.80,” Kernen said.
National security attorney Bradley Moss didn’t hold back. “The rest of the country is suffering from higher prices on everything, and this senile old man is living in a fantasy world in which it’s simply not happening,” he posted on Bluesky.
Trump also made up a story about a trade deal with the European Union, saying it gave him “$600 billion to invest in anything I want.” But that’s not remotely true.
“Well no,” wrote Steve Peers, a professor of E.U. law in London. “It’s a vague, nonbinding, unwritten nonstatement about companies’ future investment plans, not cash for him to personally control. But enjoy your weird demented fantasy, I guess.”
Then came the jaw-dropper.
Defending immigrant labor in agriculture, Trump claimed immigrants were biologically suited for hard labor in a way Americans aren’t.
“People that live in the inner city are not doing that work,” Trump said. “They’ve tried, we’ve tried, everybody tried. They don’t do it. These people [immigrants] do it naturally. Naturally… they don’t get a bad back, because if they get a bad back, they die.”
Branden McEuen, a historian who teaches the history of eugenics, didn’t mince words: “Trump saying people of color are naturally suited to farm labor sure sounds a lot like the slaveholders that said slaves were naturally inclined to servitude.”
SiriusXM host Michelangelo Signorile echoed the outrage: “The racism here is on steroids… [Trump] says brown people do hard labor ‘naturally’ and don’t get [a] bad back, while also saying they’ve tried to replace them with people ‘in the inner city’ but they can’t get them to do the work.”
It was a 30-minute trip into what many are calling Trump’s “fantasy world.” And even a CNBC host couldn’t hide his discomfort.
Watch the clip below:
Trump is on CNBC making a case that jobs numbers are rigged — even as MAGA-friendly host Joe Kernen tries to push back pic.twitter.com/9jAkiCDI8h
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 5, 2025
