Lashing Out Over Russia and Jobs Data, Trump Displays His Volatile Side

New York Times

02-08-2025

Despite slowing over the first half of the year, the U.S. economy has remained reasonably healthy. Yet when the jobs report for July was released on Friday, showing a substantial slowdown in hiring, President Trump lashed out, claiming the figures were rigged and firing the head of the government agency that produces them.
Dmitri Medvedev was once president of Russia but now is little more than the Kremlin's favorite online troll. Yet when he got under Mr. Trump's skin with provocative posts about nuclear war, Mr. Trump, already increasingly infuriated by President Vladimir V. Putin's unwillingness to work with him to end the war in Ukraine, responded on Friday as if a real superpower conflict could be brewing, ordering submarines into position to guard against any threat.
Just days earlier, Mr. Trump had returned to the United States from a golf trip happily flexing his political and diplomatic power.
A capitulating Congress had passed his signature domestic policy legislation, despite concerns over its deep cuts to the social safety net. The European Union caved to Mr. Trump and his threat of tariffs by announcing a trade deal during the president's trip to Scotland. Emboldened, Mr. Trump moved ahead with sweeping tariffs that could reshape the world economy.
But on Friday, Mr. Trump, confronted with foes and facts that he could not easily control, displayed another side of himself, responding with disproportionate intensity and a distinct impatience.
His actions were part of a pattern in which he has shown growing intolerance toward those who will not bend to his will.
Jerome H. Powell, the Federal Reserve chair who has defied Mr. Trump's demands for interest rate cuts, has been subject to withering and relentless criticism and insults from the president. Mr. Trump has assailed those of his own supporters who have refused to drop their demands for release of the Epstein files.
But his actions on Friday were especially striking because they involved fiery reactions to two of the biggest issues on his plate.
Russia under Mr. Putin, once viewed by Mr. Trump as a partner in solving big problems, has left Mr. Trump frustrated and facing mocking reminders of his pledge that he could bring the war in Ukraine to an end on his first day in office.
With Mr. Putin now responding to Mr. Trump's peace efforts by launching more attacks and brushing off threats of further U.S. sanctions, Mr. Trump has turned against him — and on Friday used his commander in chief powers to respond to baiting posts from one of Mr. Putin's online attack dogs.
Soon after disclosing on his social media platform that he had ordered nuclear submarines 'to be positioned in the appropriate regions, just in case these foolish and inflammatory statements are more than just that,' Mr. Trump fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, claiming that the employment numbers were being massaged to make him look bad.
'I think he deliberately surrounded himself with yes men and yes women,' said John R. Bolton, a former national security adviser to Mr. Trump. 'It's more evidence he's not fit to be president. This is not the way a president responds to either one of these situations.'
In firing the commissioner of the statistics bureau, Erika McEntarfer, who was confirmed on a bipartisan basis in 2024, Mr. Trump accused her of a long pattern of rigging the job numbers to hurt him before and after the 2024 election, a claim dismissed by economists across the political spectrum.
'I believe the numbers were phony, just like they were before the election,' Mr. Trump said as he left the White House on Friday. 'And there were other times. So you know what I did? I fired her, and you know what I did? The right thing.'
The move cemented many fears that Mr. Trump, who has already fired inspectors general and installed loyalists in the Justice Department, would eventually root out government officials who report politically inconvenient data or intimidate them from publicly disclosing bad news.
William W. Beach, a former head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics who was nominated by Mr. Trump during his first term, described the firing as 'groundless' and warned that it sets 'a dangerous precedent.'
'This escalates the president's unprecedented attacks on the independence and integrity of the federal statistical system,' Mr. Beach said in a joint statement with other statisticians. 'The president seeks to blame someone for unwelcome economic news.'
Mr. Trump similarly showed little caution earlier in the day in responding to Mr. Medvedev, who had said in a social media post that Mr. Trump should imagine the apocalyptic television series 'The Walking Dead' and noted the Soviet Union's system for launching a nuclear strike.
'Words are very important,' Mr. Trump said. 'And can often lead to unintended consequences. I hope this will not be one of those instances.'
Mr. Bolton said it was the president who needed to show more discipline.
'He may not even understand what he's doing,' Mr. Bolton said. 'It's so natural to him to say outrageous things that he's incapable of thinking about the strategic consequences.'
Having surrounded himself with aides unwilling to challenge his impulses, Mr. Trump faces no constraints on lashing out impulsively, Mr. Bolton said.
'Trump is not deterred by reality,' Mr. Bolton said. 'He just says what he wants to say.'
Mr. Trump's allies say he is doing exactly what he said he would do during the campaign: use his power and enlist loyal aides to enact an agenda that he promised. They say his lack of hesitancy when speaking publicly is refreshing to Americans. And they argue that he is simply using all the powers the Constitution gives the president.
But Mr. Trump has shown time and time again in his second term that he is willing to use the tools of the federal government to settle his own personal grievances and political scores.
Earlier in the week, Mr. Trump imposed sanctions — an option usually reserved as a middle ground between diplomacy and military action — on a Brazilian Supreme Court justice overseeing the case against Jair Bolsonaro, a former president of Brazil ideologically aligned with Mr. Trump.
Mr. Bolsonaro is accused of seeking to overturn the 2022 vote that ousted him, dismantle courts and hand special powers to the military. After Mr. Bolsonaro left office, thousands of his supporters ransacked government buildings in Brazil's capital, in an episode that echoed the Jan. 6, 2021, riots at the U.S. Capitol.
Mr. Bolsonaro's son had been pushing senior White House officials to place sanctions on the Brazilian judge.
In attacking Mr. Powell, the Fed chair, Mr. Trump has sought to accuse him of mismanaging an expensive renovation of the central bank's headquarters. But when Mr. Trump showed up at the building recently to make his case, Mr. Powell, in a low-key but remarkable display of defiance, publicly challenged cost figures being cited by the president.
On Friday, with the new jobs numbers suggesting that the economy is slowing on Mr. Trump's watch, the president once again called on Mr. Powell to resign.