Look, we didn’t need more evidence that President Donald Trump is a cognitively declining moron who rejects facts both because they are unflattering to him and because he doesn’t actually understand how anything works, but if we did, his recent phone interview with CNBC would ensure our cups runneth over.
Let’s start with Trump’s falsehood-filled justification for responding to an abysmal monthly jobs report by firing the statistician who compiled the numbers.
For those who are unfamiliar with the story, last Friday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released its monthly jobs report, which showed only 73,000 jobs were created in July, a number much lower than what economists were expecting. Trump, as usual, responded to the news by claiming without a single solitary shred of evidence that the figures were “RIGGED” to make him and other Republicans “look bad.” Trump then fired Erika McEntarfer, the BLS commissioner who was confirmed by the Senate in 2024 by a bipartisan vote of 86-8.
On Tuesday, conservative CNBC host Joe Kernen challenged Trump’s claims that the jobs report was rigged against him, debunking that claim as well as Trump’s factless and evidence-deficient claim that the BLS had covered up negative jobs data revisions under President Joe Biden’s administration until after the November 2024 presidential election.
Trump, however, insisted that his statements about hiding downward revisions until after the election were correct even though the biggest downward revisions actually occurred in August 2024, well before the election took place.Commenting on Trump’s assertion, Media Matters for America senior fellow Matt Gertz described it as “completely backwards.”
“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,” Gertz explained on X. “Then after the election, the October figure was revised upward. Impossible to tell if Trump is lying, dumb, or sundowning.”
Nick Tiriamos, the chief economics correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, similarly said that Trump was “getting his dates wrong” when he asserted a cover-up of negative jobs numbers given that “the big downward revision” was reported before the election took place.
Anyway, the rest of Trump’s call-in to CNBC was just as much a dumpster fire display as his jobs report propaganda. He claimed the price of gas had fallen to just $2.20 per gallon, because, for whatever reason, he does not think we have eyes capable of reading the number by “regular unleaded” on gas station signs. Kernen noted that the lowest price he’s seen for gas in the U.S. was $2.80 per gallon, and that was just him being nice, because he could’ve pointed out to Trump’s big, stupid, rust-tinted face that the national average gas price in the U.S. is still more than $3 per gallon.
Oh yeah — then there was the part where Trump started talking about migrant farm workers like he was preparing them for an antebellum auction block.
“We’re taking care of our farmers. We can’t let our farmers not have anybody,” Trump said, referring to his alleged plan to implement new rules and regulations on migrant farm labor, which comes as a result of his crackdown on undocumented migrants and how it has negatively impacted the farming industry.
“These people—you can’t replace them very easily. You know, people that live in the inner city are not doing that work,” he continued. “These people do it naturally, naturally.”
“I said … to a farmer the other day, ‘What happens if they get a bad back?’ He said, ‘They don’t get a bad back, sir, because if they get a bad back, they die.’ I said, ‘That’s interesting, isn’t it?’” Trump continued. “These are, in many ways, very special people.”
Besides the fact that Trump just randomly brought up people in the “inner city” — which has always been code for “Black people” — despite inner city residents not being part of the conversation, the president is making migrants sound like labor machines or human chattel, and, as folks across social media have noted, it’s racist as hell.
Look, MAGA supporters are going to say people are reaching by calling Trump’s words a callback to slavery, but that’s because they prefer their Black history either severely whitewashed or done away with altogether. Of all the numerous false justifications white southerners leaned on to whitesplain slavery on a (non)scientific level, one of the most popular was the notion that Africans were genetically and intellectually inferior, but physically stronger and more enduring, which made them perfectly suited for slave labor. It’s worth noting that this is far from the first time Trump has dabbled in scientific racism regarding Black and Hispanic migrants. Last year, while he was still campaigning for his second term, Trump, completely unprompted, started making wild and egregiously racist claims that migrants are predisposed to commit murder and other violent crimes because they have “bad genes.”
So, just to recap: Trump doesn’t understand how economic figures work, he has probably never seen a gas pump in person before, and he appears to be one interview away from introducing the undocumented migrant community to the fine art of sharecropping.
Are we making America great again yet?
See social media’s response to the interview below
