Jobs data show Trump economy is really bad

What a difference a year makes.

- MICHAEL HILTZIK COLUMNIST

OVERALL job growth disappeared in 2025. Above, President Trump tours a Thermo Fisher Scientific site Wednesday in Reading, Ohio.

(ANDREW HARNIK / Getty Images)

Last year at about this time, Elon Musk was boasting that his DOGE team could achieve $2 trillion in federal budget savings by paring down the government workforce. In November, President Trump announced plans to send $2,000 “tariff dividend checks” to all Americans “(not including high income people!),” he said.During his election campaign, Trump promised to cut gas and home electric bills in half. Late last year, he was claiming that gasoline prices had fallen below $2.a gallon in some parts of the country; during his recent State of the Union address, he asserted that gas was “below $2.30 a gallon in most states.”

None of this has come to pass.

What's worse, the arrows on most charts of U.S. economic activity are pointing down. The exceptions are the inflation and unemployment rates, which are pointing up — and most of those charts covered a period prior to Trump’s Iran war, which has sent gas prices and consequently inflation soaring.

The most notable blow to Trump's narrative of an ever-strengthening economy was delivered by the Bureau of Labor Statistics on Friday, when it reported that nonfarm payrolls had fallen by a startling 92,000 jobs in February. (Economists had expected a modest increase.)

Forecasts of U.S. gross domestic product in the current quarter ending March 31 reflect a high level of economic distress, though they don’t currently point to a recession.

The GDPNow forecast of the Atlanta Federal Reserve Bank slid to an annual rate of 2.1% after Friday's jobs report, down from 3.1% as recently as Feb. 20. The New York Fed’s GDP Nowcast has been drifting lower since early January, settling last week at an annualized 2.23% — not including the effect of the job numbers.