1. Unemployment
Yesterday Peter Navarro went on Fox Business and warned Panicans not to freak out over the jobs numbers that would come out this morning. Why?
“We have to revise our expectations down significantly for what a monthly job number should look like,” he said. “Wall Street . . . can’t rain on that parade, they have to adjust for the fact that we’re deporting millions of illegals out of our job market.”
My understanding had been that the Trump administration is deporting gangs, murderers, rapists, Tren de Aragua—“the worst of the worst.” But Navarro says the administration is actually deporting millions of hard-working immigrants.
It’s all so confusing!1
Well we got those jobs numbers this morning and . . . wow.
I sat down the Catherine Rampell and Paul Krugman to talk about it. You can watch the conversation here. It’s high-quality stuff. But I want to expand on some thoughts, because I saw this question in yesterday’s YouGov poll and it made me laugh like the Joker:
That’s right. By a margin of 46 to 40, voters think Biden did a better job as president.
How could they think that? All of the headlines this morning are about how the 130,000 jobs added in January beat expectations! Well, let me show you some data that explain exactly what Donald Trump has done to America’s economy.
First things first: Does 130,000 new jobs for the month of January 2026 sound good to you? It shouldn’t.
Congratulations, Mr. President, on achieving job growth for one month that would have been among the worst of Biden’s term.
But even these 130,000 new jobs might not be real? Because the revision announced today for 2025 was brutal. The seasonally adjusted total number of jobs added for 2025 had been 584,000—which was already bad. The revision shows that even this was a huge overstatement. The economy only added 181,000 jobs for all of 2025.
That’s the Trump economy.
Again, I want to make very clear what happened: