The White House has launched an aggressive public relations campaign promoting a narrative of economic strength during the first six months of United States President Donald Trump, with claims of his policies fueling “America’s golden age”.
But an Al Jazeera analysis of economic data shows the reality is more mixed.
Trump’s claims of his policies boosting the US economy suffered a blow on Friday when the latest jobs report revealed that the country had added a mere 73,000 jobs last month, well below the 115,000 forecasters had expected. The only additions were in the healthcare sector, which added 55,000 jobs, and the social services sector added 18,000.
US employers also cut 62,075 jobs in July — up 29 percent from cuts in the month before, and 140 percent higher than this time last year, according to the firm Challenger, Gray and Christmas, which tracks monthly job cuts. Government, tech, and retail sectors are the industries that saw the biggest declines so far this year.
It comes as this month’s jobs and labour turnover report showed an economic slowdown. There were 7.4 million open jobs in the US, down from 7.7 million a month before.
The Department of Labour on Friday released downward revisions to both the May and June jobs reports, significantly changing the picture the White House had previously painted.
“For the FOURTH month in a row, jobs numbers have beat market expectations with nearly 150,000 good jobs created in June,” the White House said in a July 3 release following the initial June report.
The Labor Department had reported an addition of 147,000 jobs in June. On Friday, it sharply revised down that number to just 14,000. May’s report also saw a big downgrade from 144,000 to only 19,000 jobs gained. Trump has since fired the head of the agency that produces the monthly jobs data, alleging that the data had been manipulated to make him look bad.
Even before the revisions, June’s report was the first to reflect early signs of economic strain tied to the administration’s tariff threats, as it revealed that job growth was concentrated in areas such as state and local government and healthcare. Sectors more exposed to trade policy – including construction, wholesale trade, and manufacturing – were flat. Meanwhile, leisure and hospitality showed weak growth, even in peak summer, reflecting falling travel demand both at home and abroad.
The administration also claimed that native-born workers accounted for all job gains since January. That assertion is misleading as it implies that no naturalised citizens or legally present foreign workers gained employment.
However, it is true that employment among foreign-born workers has declined – by over half a million jobs – claims that native-born workers are replacing foreign-born labour, are not supported by the jobs data.
Jobs lost in sectors with high foreign-born employment, including tech, have been abundant, driven by tariffs and automation, particularly AI. In fact, recent layoffs in tech have been explicitly attributed to AI advancements, not labour displacement by other groups.
Companies including Recruit Holdings — the parent company of Indeed and Glassdoor, Axel Springer, IBM, Duolingo and others have already made headcount reductions directly attributed to AI advancements.
Wage growth
The pace of rise of wage growth, an indicator of economic success, has slowed in recent months. That is partly due to the Federal Reserve keeping interest rates steady in hopes of keeping inflation stable.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, wages have been outpacing inflation since 2023, after a period of declining real wages following the COVID pandemic.
Wage growth ticked up by 0.3 percent in July from a month prior. Compared with this time last year, wage growth is 3.9 percent, according to Friday’s Labor Department jobs report.
Earlier this year, the White House painted a picture that wage growth differed between the era of former President Joe Biden and now under Trump because of policy.
“Blue-collar workers have seen real wages grow almost two percent in the first five months of President Trump’s second term — a stark contrast from the negative wage growth seen during the first five months of the Biden Administration,” the White House said in a release.
However, Biden and Trump inherited two very different economies when they took office. Biden has to deal with a massive global economic downturn driven by the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Trump, on the other hand, during his second term, inherited “unquestionably the strongest economy” in more than two decades, per the Economic Policy Institute, particularly because of the US economy’s rebound compared with peer nations.
Inflation
Inflation peaked in mid-2022 during Biden’s term at 9 percent, before falling steadily because of the Federal Reserve’s efforts to manage a soft landing.
A July 21 White House statement claimed, “Since President Trump took office, core inflation has tracked at just 2.1 percent.” On Wednesday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessett said “inflation is cooling” in a post on X.
However, the Consumer Price Index report, which tracks core inflation – a measure that excludes the price of volatile items such as food and energy – was 2.9 percent in the most recent report and overall inflation was at 2.7 perce