By Josh Bork
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump unexpectedly summoned a reporter to his oval office on Thursday, bringing a chart showing the US economy is solid following last week’s employment report.
Joined Trump and spoke about the economy was Stephen Moore, a senior visiting fellow in economics at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank and co-author of the 2018 book, “Trumpnomics.”
Moore flipped through a series of charts with easels to promote Trump’s performance as president, and to reduce former President Joe Biden’s economic performance. Trump stood next to Moore and intervened via approval.
The moment in the Oval Office talked about the president’s hopes to reset the story of the US economy. The stock market is solid, but job growth slowed, and inflationary pressures rose as Trump imposes a huge set of new tariffs, a tax on imports.
Moore said he called Trump because he put together some data that showed that it was correct to dismiss Erica Mantelfer as head of the BLS. He said the report from the BLS overestimated 1.5 million jobs created over the past two years of Biden’s term.
“I think they did that on purpose,” Trump said. Revisions are standard elements of employment reporting and tend to grow during periods of economic disruption.
The economy rarely fits the president’s whim, and often presents subtle photos that are much more mixed and mixed than what can be easily sold to voters. For the first seven months of this year, employers added 597,000 jobs. This was about 44% down from profits in the same period in 2024.
The July employment report showed that just 73,000 jobs were added last month, with the May and June totals revised down below 258,000.
Biden faced a downward revision of occupational numbers, but the economy added 2 million jobs in 2024 and 2.6 million jobs in 2023.
The fundamental challenge in Biden’s economy was the shock of inflation as the annual consumer price index reached a four-year high in June 2022. That level of inflation felt like food, gasoline, housing and other essentials were emotions that would help Trump return to the White House in the 2024 election.
Due to his tariffs, there are signs that inflation heating will return under Trump. On Thursday, Goldman Sachs estimated that its upcoming July inflation report showed consumer prices rose 3% over the past 12 months, up from 2.3% reading in April.
Trump has promised he can mess up the boom. And when the nonpartisan data showed something close to confusion, he found an advocate in Moore. Moore retracted his name after facing a pushback in the Senate.
Moore said that during the first five months of Trump’s second term, “the median average household income adjusted for inflation and average American families has already increased by $1,174.” Moore said his figures are based on unreleased Census Bureau data and could be difficult to verify independently.
“That’s an incredible number,” Trump said. “If I had said this, no one would have believed it.”
Original issue: August 7, 2025, 5:59pm EDT
